Georgia O'Keeffe
Color and Abstraction
"Filling a space in a beautiful way. That is what art means to me."
Her LIFE
- Georgia O'Keeffe was born in 1887, on a farm in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. She said, "I lived in an old-fashioned house - open fires and a lot of brothers and sisters - and horses and trees."
- She started drawing early in life, and when she was 10 years old she made up her mind to be an artist.
- She studied and taught art for a long time.
- She married a photographer, Alfred Stieglitz (STEE-glitz). He supported her in her artistic career, and photographed her hundreds of times.
- When she reached her 80's she had to stop painting. She dreamed of living to 100, but died March 1986 at 98 years of age.
“When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else. Most people in the city rush around so, they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether they want to or not.”
Her Technique
- Georgia O'Keeffe's favorite technique was to monumentalize small objects, like flowers.
- She did this by changing the scale of the flowers, as well as by enlarging and cropping their form so that they would fill up her large canvases.
- Her work compels us to study and appreciate the form and color of flowers.