When she was in eighth grade, Georgia O'Keeffe announced that she was going to be an artist. She never veered from that path.

O'Keeffe studied art with several teachers. She learned to "fill space in a beautiful way" from Alon Bement at the University of Virginia. This wonderful sensitivity to space can be seen in all her work, especially her flower paintings. O'Keeffe painted flowers larger than life, to take viewers by surprise and give them a perspective similar to her own.

O'Keeffe's earliest training was in the styles of the great masters of Europe. Their subjects, however, held little interest for her. She wanted to paint the rocks, mountains, and wide-open spaces around her. When she decided at age 29 to focus totally on nature, she burned her earlier work and decided to start anew, emphasizing shapes and forms. O'Keeffe continued following her own vision throughout her life, never being pulled into Abstract Expressionism, Pop art, or any of the other movements that dominated twentieth-century American art.

O'Keeffe loved to see "connections" in the shapes of ordinary things. After painting a shell and a shingle many times, she looked out the window of her adobe home in Abiquiu, New Mexico, and painted a mountain. She later realized that she had given the mountain the same shape as the shell and the shingle.

O'Keeffe saw beautiful form everywhere. Some of her well-known paintings are of parched bones that she found as she walked in the desert around her home. Every form became for her an abstraction.