Georgia O'Keeffe
United States, 1887-1986

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.