_Georgia O'Keefe _
By: Megan Berg
Georgia O'Keeffe "The meaning of a word - to me - is not as exact as the
meaning of a color. Colors and shapes make a more definite statement than
words. I write this because such odd things have been done about me with
words. I have often been told what to paint. I am often amazed at the spoken
and written word telling me what I have painted. I make this effort because no
one else can know how my paintings happen. Where I was born and where and how
I have lived is unimportant. It is what I have done with where I have been
that should be of interest." Georgia O'Keeffe Georgia O'Keeffe is one
of the most influential artists there is today. Her works are valued highly
and are quite beautiful and unique. As a prominent American artist, Georgia
O'Keeffe is famous for her images of gigantic flowers, city-scapes and
distinctive desert scenes. All of these different phases represent times in
her life. Throughout the seventy years of her creative career, Georgia
O'Keeffe continually made some of the most original contributions to the art
of our timeAs Georgia O'Keeffe's awareness of her sexuality heightened, she
started to paint marvelous original abstractions in exuberant rainbows or
colors. These colors seemed to celebrate her happiness. One of her paintings
Music--Pink and Blue I, she encircles a "blue vaginal void with pulsating
waves of rippling pink and white" (Lisle 102). From just looking at this
picture you would not think that it was a vaginal void. There is always so
much that you can get from a picture. Everyone that looks at it will
definitely have a different interpretation of what they see in it. The white
sizing under the smooth surface makes the colors luminate in Music--Pink and
Blue I. The two oval shapes bring out the sea, sky, and other images. The
central form is a little more complex. The left archway uses blues and pinks
alternately. On the inner edge of the arch, pink hues mix in to rose with gray
edges. The warm colors and lines are controlled yet fluid. As the title tells,
an inner and outer harmony is reached Georgia O'Keeffe's Black Iris is noted
for its sensual suggestiveness, but she insisted that she was representing the
flower itself. She even flatly denied that the flower was a metaphor for
female genitalia O'Keeffe's flowers were painted frontally and revealingly
had the effect of making the human beings who stood in front of them become
smaller. "The observer feels like Alice after she had imbibed the 'Drink Me'
phial" wrote a reviewer in amusement. The size of the bloom relative to a
human really reflected the relative importance of nature and mankind in the
artist's eyes. Georgia O'Keeffe painted everything from lilies, jonquils,
daisies, irises, sweet peas, morning glories, poppies, forget-me-nots,
marigolds, poinsettias, orchids, sunflowers, petunias, marigolds, and many
more were reborn in her paintings. O'Keeffe wasn't happy because people looked
at her paintings and tried to see them in the way of a female. She said,
"Well--I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to
really notice my flower you hung all your own associations with flowers on my
flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and
see of the flower--and I don't." She did not like the idea that people thought
she painted the way she did because she was a female. She painted that way
because that was how she saw things. The flowers that she created epitomize
her growth, success, magnetism, and energy at that certain stage in her
career. Her choice to paint these flowers was influenced by her early
training, natural attraction to flowers, and the idea of something fresh and
fragile Close observations of O'Keeffe's flowers show that she never really
pursued the realistic approach. She didn't paint every petal and detail.
Instead she gave her flowers a life of their own, and expression that changed
significantly between 1918 and 1938. Her red canna painting gradually enlarged
the central flower image and brought it closer to the edges of the canvas.
Between 1926 and 1929 she painted a group of views of New York City. New York
Night transforms skyscrapers into patterned, glittering structures that deny
their volume. Most of these buildings were further simplified in her paintings
and O'Keeffe was even able to find tranquility in them that contrasted with
the urban environment. The city was a major theme in her work only between
these years. During this time she produced some twenty-five paintings and
drawings of urban scenery. This paintings are divided into three registers:
the darkened water towers and irregular rooflines of the east side of
Manhattan, the calm waters of the East River, and the jagged piers and smoggy
covered factory smokestacks of Long Island City It was a trip to New Mexico
in 1929 that led O'Keeffe to the semiabstract style for which she became
famous. The region's dramatic mesas, ancient Spanish architecture, vegetation,
and desiccated terrain became her themes. She thought of bones as whitened
relics and symbols of the desert, nothing more. Georgia O'Keeffe changed her
style of painting to bones. In her picture From the Faraway Nearby, she paints
a pair of elk's antlers suspended in a pinkish-blue dawn over some snow-capped
mountains. Like the other pictures of skulls in the sky, this one also seems
to have been painted from an elevated point, as if the artist herself was
levitating on a shimmering desert heat wave. This picture reminds some people
of the "joyful promise of everlasting life in the message of the Christian
Resurrection" (Lisle 234). In the paintings of bones compared to her earlier
works, her colors are less strident, forms are less, and overall the mood is
more serene. More light than before is taken into the canvas and there is now
a larger sense of spaciousness. These pictures lacked a middle distance:
Objects appeared either very near or very far in the desert air. This is a
total contrast from her views of enlarged flowers. The pioneers of American
abstraction responded to modern European movements in individual ways. Georgia
O'Keeffe approached her subjects, whether buildings or flowers, landscapes or
bones, by intuitively magnifying their shapes and simplifying their details to
underscore their essential beauty. Her painting of Black Cross, is a large,
dark cross which seems to stand watch over the rolling hills at sunset,
proclaiming man's presence in this stark landscape In Grey Hill Forms,
Georgia O'Keeffe begins with the traditionally painterly ideals. Strong
diagonal lines of recession draw the eye through the scene to create a
smoothly three dimensional space. The yellow and green colors blend into
deeper indigos and grays. The dramatic contrasts in light and tone aid in the
formation of space without causing too much motion in the scene. The strong
lines throughout give the images more conceptual meaning. The mountains are
tangible and solid, clearly separated from both the ground and the deep blue
sky. The light dramatizes both the depth and clarity in the painting Georgia
O'Keeffe is more concerned with the essential identity of things rather than
the mere visual appearance. Suspicious of intellectual approaches to art, she
was an introspective and independent visionary who thrived on isolation.
O'Keeffe's original American works encompass a wide vision from taut city
towers to desertscapes in such vivid hues and startled the senses. Throughout
history she has made contributions to the history of American art and as
Americans we will be forever thankful.
_Bibliography _
Works Cited Castro, Jan Garden. The Art and Life of Georgia O'Keeffe. New
York: Crown Publishers, 1985. Laurie Lisle. Portrait of an Artist: A Biography
of Georgia O'Keeffe. New York: Seaview Books, 1980. O'Keeffe, Georgia. Georgia
O'Keeffe. New York: The Viking Press, 1976.
Word Count: 1272
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