FREE ESSAY ON GEORGIA O'KEEFE

GEORGIA O'KEEFE

* 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 time. As 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. 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 her life, Georgia O'Keefe made
contributions to the history of American art and as Americans we will be forever
thankful.