If
you have ever seen a really large, really close-up painting of a
flower, you may have seen a piece of artwork by Georgia O'Keeffe.
Born on this day in 1887, in Wisconsin, O'Keeffe came to New York
City's art scene at a time when women still had no access to training
at universities, and there were no well-known women artists.
But
in less than a decade, O'Keeffe had managed to make herself one of
America's most important modern artists—of either sex!
Because
she made such compelling artwork, and because she was a trailblazer
for women artists, Georgia O'Keeffe became an important cultural
icon.
Although
O'Keeffe was born in Wisconsin, studied art at an art school in
Chicago, worked as an art teacher in South Carolina and Texas, and
gained fame in New York City, many of us associate O'Keeffe with New
Mexico. She traveled to New Mexico every summer for years and
eventually made it her permanent home. She often explored deserts and
mountains and canyons, hiking or driving her Model A Ford. She
purchased a place called Ghost Ranch, where she painted the nearby
cliffs and cattle and other skulls she'd found.
O'Keeffe
married a famous photographer, Alfred Stieglitz, whose gallery
showing of O'Keeffe helped put her on the map. She lived to be 98
years old!
Up
Close, and Closer
Georgia
O'Keeffe is particularly famous for her large-scale, up-close
portraits of flowers. Flower parts that aren't even three inches long
have been expanded to fill a three-foot-long canvas! By magnifying
flower shapes so much that we are zoomed in to flower centers, the
familiar flower forms become unfamiliar abstract shapes.
O'Keeffe
said, "I
decided that if I could paint that flower in a huge scale, you could
not ignore its beauty."
Check
out the online images available at the O'Keeffe Museum. Then use them
as inspiration as you paint your own up-close flower picture.
The
images on art-dot-com are zoomable in several ways.
First, click on an image to see a larger version of it. You can move
your mouse around the picture to see a closer-up image, or you can
click “Zoom” to see the largest-scale image.
To
find out more about Georgia O'Keeffe, maybe you can find Georgia's Bones, or one of these other books, at a local library or
bookstore.
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