OKeeffe Georgia - Georgia OKeeffe

Art became Georgia OKeeffes lodestar from her earliest childhood, as she navigated towards her goal, both in and out of art schools. American pragmatism and love of the tangible, the cleanly sculpted line and the technical mastery of colour informed her art making. She first trained to be an art teacher, and in later years though she never taught again after 1918 demonstrated her didactic manner in terse but distilled ways of seeing. She articulated her artistic priority clearly: I think Id rather let the painting work for itself than help it with the word.

The artist taught her public to take time to see, admonishing those busy New Yorkers who never stopped to look at a flower. Engrossed by the worlds within flora, OKeeffe unfurled purple petunias and calla lilies, and magnified the simple stalk of corn, taking her gaze down to the fine little lake of dew nestling at the core of the plant. She wrote spare, poetic statements on nature, her meditation and the forms in my head that she always identified as the source of her daring abstractions. In one evocative passage in a letter of 1917 from OKeeffe to Alfred Stieglitz she wrote of the space that is watching the starlight that space that is between what they call heaven and earth out there in what they call the night. This liminal space, a seeming nothingness, became the centre of her creative invention.

Georgia Totto OKeeffes story is one that not only is rooted in the American prairie, where she was born on a Wisconsin dairyfarm on 15 November 1887, but also reflects the pioneer daring of the mid-nineteenth-century Dutch, Hungarian and Irish immigrant generations that formed her ancestry. She followed a peripatetic pathway to later success in New York, first studying and teaching art in both public schools and colleges. Her exhibition life as an artist began in a hastily arranged, experimental group show in May 1916, when the renowned photographer and gallery impresario Alfred Stieglitz (18641946) first showed her recent charcoal abstractions at 291 Fifth Avenue. OKeeffes art emerged precisely at the time that American women gained the right to vote, signalling her own struggle to make her voice heard through artistic expression.

The reality of the harsh winters in Wisconsin gave her grandmothers and mothers generation of pioneer women the strict resilience of making-do, learning basic life skills and surviving unforeseen crises, whether due to climate or in times of illness and death in the family. Her upbringing and childhood on a farm cultivated an independence that was both powerful and inborn. OKeeffes gaze favoured wide-open spaces her love of the wind-blown prairie in Texas and, later, the high desert vistas of New Mexico. Like the nineteenth-century pioneers moving west, OKeeffe sought out an extraordinary landscape, what many thought a desolate land. She stamped her vision of the land with the imprint of strength and endurance: the desert even tho it is vast and empty and untouchable knows no kindness with all its beauty.

OKeeffes art articulated both a modernist expressive vision, filling space in a beautiful way based on her study of Asian composition with Arthur Wesley Dow at Columbia University. Her paintings and abstract designs avoided the human figure, and she certainly never wanted to become a portraitist (though drawings of family members exist from her early training). Instead, she described her process in her own way: There are

Her innovative and sensuous embrace of nature imparted a powerful organic expression to the simple still-life, once associated with womens art. As she established her presence in New York with yearly exhibitions, beginning in 1923, her studies of flowers, shells and stones became sites of powerful meditation, and controversy. She then expanded her view of the landscape to enlarge the crosses and relics of the southwest, starting in the summer of 1929, ultimately defining a new iconography of skull, pelvis and floating antlers, ethereally and mysteriously elevated above the land, against the vast sky.