Georgia O'Keeffe

Happy Birthday Georgia O’Keeffe!! One of my absolute favorite influences is Georgia O’Keeffe, born in a farmhouse, in Wisconsin, in 1887. She determined in eighth grade that she would become an artist, but it was not until after she taught elementary art for a time in Texas that she was “discovered” by Alfred Stieglitz (who was to become her husband) and began to realize her dream. Always seemingly connected to the Earth and nature, O’Keeffe painted the wide-open spaces of rural America in combination with the intimate details of flowers, rocks and bones. She divided her time between New York and New Mexico, finally moving to New Mexico fulltime in 1940, but still traveling to New York to be with Stieglitz until his death in 1946. Her work combines large scale figurative with abstraction and can be quite emotional and sensitive. In the last ten years of her life, her eyesight failing, young potter, Juan Hamilton, showed up at her ranch looking for work and was to become O’Keeffe’s confidante, pottery teacher and companion for the remainder of her years. This past summer I had the chance to spend some delightful time in The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico enjoying an exhibit of some of her lesser-known abstractions. Then just this past weekend I was able to see a very obscure painting in the exhibit Sensory Crossovers at the Albuquerque Art and History Museum, Cow, which I am including here. In it the cow, resembling one of her geat flower close-ups, tips her head to lick an apple from the tree.