Georgia O’Keefe (1887-1986) was an American modernist painter and one of the most famous female artists in the world.

Take Sunset on Long Island above. An oil on canvas board piece, that great big ball of orange draws you in alongside the enticing symmetry of it all. It was painted in 1939.

That work is very influential to this day and we’re eager to dive on into her canon to dig out the best bits.

Colours, Composition, Lines, and Wavey Symmetry in Georgia O’Keefe’s Arty

We look at George O’Keeffe’s artwork and we see a wavey version of Wassily Kandinsky’s abstract angles. O’Keeffe mastered curious colourings and making everyday items seem fantastical.

She was renowned for her paintings of flowers.

Check out Abstraction White Rose (1927) below to see what we’re getting at. It’s like a swirling mass of clouds, or some deep space cosmos type deal.

You can draw (yes?!) comparisons with Swedish artist Hilma af Klint’s work, too. She was a brilliant abstract masterclass type ahead of her time.

And O’Keeffe fell into that area, for sure, and she was prolific about it. She created over 2,000 pieces of art throughout her career. She particularly grew to love remote landscapes.

She clearly found desolate deserts, and the bones of animals therein, to have particular resonance. As by the 1930s she became renowned for pieces like this.

That’s From the Faraway (1937). You wouldn’t exactly say it looks nice… but the artistic point, its theme, is pretty clear. Death and sweeping landscapes and all that. The enormity of existence stretching ahead.

She was clear on why she was doing such work, anyway:

“To me they are as beautiful as anything I know … The bones seem to cut sharply to the centre of something that is keenly alive on the desert even though it is vast and empty and untouchable.”

It was all part of a constantly evolving, and versatile, style she had. O’Keeffe didn’t seem to stick to one style of art for too long and constantly tried new ideas.

As earlier in her career she was doing striking stuff like this. Radiator Building – Night, New York (1927) and it looks like an early form of pop art.

And those skyscrapers must have seemed radical to O’Keeffe. Born in 1887, by the 1920s New York was modernised enough with skyscrapers it must have appeared like a different planet.

What we must note is just the sheer extent, and range, of her work.

There’s so much of it, and all in varying styles, it’s worth spending a few hours looking through her canon. You can do that online at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum.

The museum is in Santa Fe, New Mexico, so if you’re in the area… well worth a visit, wouldn’t you say?

And it’s from touring through that site we quickly found our favourite work from Georgia O’Keeffe. Predictably from us, it was all in the abstract angles and swathes of rhythms and melodies. Innit.

A Series of Sounds and Abstractions

For us, where O’Keeffe stands out is with that focus on turning everyday objects or landscapes into weird abstractions.

Blue and Green Music (1921) is what we’re going on about. Behold!

The name suggests it’s channelling synesthesia or some such (when you see colour in sounds, a condition Kandinsky had). That was our initial feeling on this piece.

That was our initial feeling on it and, sure enough, O’Keeffe was aiming for something similar. She was very keen on:

“The idea that music could be translated into something for the eye.”

That one is actually a small piece of only 58.4 cm by 48.3 cm.

Music, Pink and Blue (1918) was an earlier example, which you could argue also has a resemblance to one of her flower paintings.

Vivid colours, eh? Makes us think of author and artist Leonora Carrington, who was from our neck of the woods.

That could give way too moody pieces such as Storm Cloud, Lake George (1923), which was one of O’Keeffe’s more dramatic works.

The more we toured through her body of work, the more pieces we found that just made us go, “Bloody hell, we like that one too!”

And in the end we do have to stop. We’ve got other things to do than keep flagging up her great work (believe it or not). But we will nod one final time here to Abstraction Blue Wave and Three Red Circles from the 1970s.

Brilliant stuff, no doubt, from someone who dedicated their life to art. So, we’re going to end on a note about the woman behind it all.

A Bit About Georgia O’Keeffe

O’Keefe was the second of seven children and grew up on a farm in Wisconsin. By the time she was a teenager O’Keeffe was determined to be an artist.

After studying at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Students League in New York, following graduation she worked in Chicago as a commercial artist between 1908-1910.

As an indication of how just ill everyone got back in those days, her mother was gravely ill with tuberculosis. And her father became bankrupt, so she couldn’t finance her studies any further.

Whilst in Chicago she developed measles and moved to Virginia to recuperate, during which time she didn’t paint for four years.

Once recovered she began painting with a vengeance and there was no stopping her. Across her body of work, she painted almost 150 oil paintings and 700 sketches. Add into that charcoals, pastels, and watercolours and you see how passionate she was for all this.

Personal life wise, she had an open relationship with photographer Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946). Although he regular had affairs and the couple never had any children.

After he died suddenly of a stroke, she lived in New York for three years to settle his estate. She later maintained a close relationship with artist Rebecca Strand, although it’s unclear if this was a partnership.

Later in life her eyesight began failing but, into her 90s, she still had the creative will. In 1977, aged 90, she said:

“I can see what I want to paint. The thing that makes you want to create is still there.”

Undeterred, she relied on several assistants to help her create more work. These pieces drew heavily on her favourite concepts and she relied on the power of her imagination (and her memory) to complete the work.

The legacy of her work is very real.

In our local teashop, called Teapi in the distant realm of Lancashire, England, there hangs an adaptation of O’Keeffe’s Ram’s Head White Hollyhock.