A discussion on the paintings of American artist, Georgia O’Keefe.
This paper analyzes Georgia O’Keefe’s landscape paintings and examines how they relate to herself and to the American culture in general. The paper discusses how O’Keefe taught us to look at the land around us, and the objects in it, from a different perspective each time. The paper describes paintings such as a skyscraper in ‘City night’, the mortal remains of past creatures, gorgeous blooms and ivory smooth skeletons; the paper demonstrates how each shows us the American landscape in a new and startlingly revealing light.
Georgia O’ Keefe was born on November 15, 1887, the second of seven children, and grew up on a farm in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. O’Keeffe pursued studies at the Art Institute of Chicago (1905-1906) and at the Art Students League, New York (1907-1908), where she was quick to master the principles of the approach to art making that then formed the basis of the curriculum–imitative realism. It was at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, where she was doing a summer course that she was introduced to the then revolutionary ideas of artist and art educator Arthur Wesley Dow.
Dow postulated that the goal of art was the expression of the artist’s personal ideas and feelings and that such subject matter was best executed by harmonious arrangements of line, color, and notan (the Japanese system of lights and darks).
`In an attempt to discover a personal language through which she could express her own feelings and ideas, she began a series of abstract charcoal drawings that are now recognized as being among the most innovative in all of American art of the period. She mailed some of these drawings to a former Columbia classmate, who showed them to the internationally known photographer and art impresario, Alfred Stieglitz, who helped O’Keefe become the household name she is.`
Dow postulated that the goal of art was the expression of the artist’s personal ideas and feelings and that such subject matter was best executed by harmonious arrangements of line, color, and notan (the Japanese system of lights and darks).
`In an attempt to discover a personal language through which she could express her own feelings and ideas, she began a series of abstract charcoal drawings that are now recognized as being among the most innovative in all of American art of the period. She mailed some of these drawings to a former Columbia classmate, who showed them to the internationally known photographer and art impresario, Alfred Stieglitz, who helped O’Keefe become the household name she is.`