Georgia O'Keeffe

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Georgia O’Keeffe (born November 15, 1887) was an American artist.


Dow believed that the goal of art was the expression of the artist's personal ideas and feelings and that such subject matter was best realized through harmonious arrangements of line, color, and notan (the Japanese system of lights and darks). Dow's ideas offered O'Keeffe an alternative to imitative realism, and she experimented with them for two years, while she was either teaching art in the Amarillo, Texas public schools or working summers in Virginia as Bement's assistant.

O'Keeffe was in New York again from fall 1914 to June 1915, taking courses at Teachers College. By the fall of 1915, when she was teaching art at Columbia College, Columbia, South Carolina, she decided to put Dow's theories to the test. 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, on January 1, 1916.

when O'Keeffe first began painting large-scale depictions of flowers as if seen close up, which are among her best-known pictures, she had become recognized as one of America's most important and successful artists.

O'Keeffe continued to work in oil until the mid–1970s, when failing eyesight forced her to abandon painting. Although she continued working in pencil and watercolor until 1982, she also produced objects in clay until her health failed in 1984. She died two years later, at the age of 98.


She is chiefly known for paintings in which she synthesizes abstraction and representation in paintings of flowers, rocks, shells, animal bones and landscapes. Her paintings present crisply contoured forms that are replete with subtle tonal transitions of varying colors, and she often transformed her subject matter into powerful abstract images.

she was introduced to the cutting edge ideas of Arthur Wesley Dow by Alon Bement. Dow's teachings encouraged artists to express themselves through harmonious designs of line, color, and shape, and they strongly influenced O'Keeffe's thinking about the process of making art.

While at Columbia College, O'Keeffe decided to put Dow's ideas to the test, and in turning to abstraction, created a series of charcoal drawings that are among the most innovative of any art produced in the period.