Georgia O'Keeffe

Georgia O'Keeffe

Americagn Painter, 1887 - 1986

Georgia Totto O'Keeffe was born in a farmhouse on a large dairy farm outside of Sun Prairie, Wisconsin on November 15, 1887. She knew from an early age she would be an artist. One of her earliest memories was sitting among white flowers outside her parents' farmhouse in the wheat country when she was nine months old. That vision of light would illuminate her work for the greater part of a century.

Georgia O'Keeffe began her career 80 years ago at a time when women were not recognized in the art world. She received her formal art education at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Students' League in New York City.

In 1914, Georgia O'Keeffe accepted a teaching position at Columbia College in South Carolina. Her schedule was light enough to allow her to paint. It was here she began to strip away what she had learned and paint what she felt. "I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me... shapes and ideas so near to me... so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn't occurred to me to put them down... "

Georgia O'Keeffe's work was first exhibited in 1916 in a show at "291", the gallery started by Alfred Stieglitz to show work by artists trying new forms. Stieglitz encouraged O'Keeffe to pursue her personal vision of abstract design in nature. She married Stieglitz in 1924, and lived in New York, where some of her most popular works, her enormous flower pictures, were born.

A trip to Taos, New Mexico in 1929 would forever change O'Keeffe's life. She said, " ...out the very large window to rich green alfalfa fields, then the sage brush and beyond - a most perfect mountain... I feel like myself, and I like it."

After Stieglitz's death in 1946, O'Keeffe returned to the southwest living in Abiquiu. "All the earth colors of the painter's palette are out there in the many miles of badlands... " Here she painted her series of skulls describing them as "[cutting] sharply to the center of something that is keenly alive on the desert even though it is vast and empty and untouchable...and knows no kindness with all its beauty."

In 1962, Georgia O'Keeffe was elected to the 50 member American Academy of Arts and Letters, the nation's highest honor society for people in the arts. Georgia O'Keeffe's paintings were her tribute to the artwork of nature—the shapes, the colors, the simplicity, the indomitable life force. Her oils, charcoals and watercolors were her vision of the glory of the living world. As Georgia O'Keeffe's art is a tribute to nature, her enduring paintings are a tribute to the life of an extraordinary and pioneering soul.

Find beautiful framed art prints by Georgia O'Keeffe.