Georgia O'Keeffe
...ome smaller. "The observer feels like Alice after she had imbibed the 'Drink Me' phial" wrote a reviewer in amusement. The size of the bloom relative to a human really reflected the relative importance of nature and mankind in the artist's eyes. Georgia O'Keeffe painted everything from lilies, jonquils, daisies, irises, sweet peas, morning glories, poppies, forget-me-nots, marigolds, poinsettias, orchids, sunflowers, petunias, marigolds, and many more were reborn in her paintings. O'Keeffe wasn't happy because people looked at her paintings and tried to see them in the way of a female. She said, "Well--I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower you hung all your own associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower--and I don't." She did not like the idea that people thought she painted the way she did because she was a female. She painted that way because that was how she saw things. The flowers that she created epitomize her growth, success, magnetism, and energy at that certain stage in her career. Her choice to paint these flowers was influenced by her early training, natural attraction to flowers, and the idea of something fresh and fragile. Close observations of O'Keeffe's flowers show that she never really pursued the realistic approach. She didn't paint every petal and detail. Instead she gave her flowers a life of their own, and expression that changed significantly between 1918 and 1938. Her red canna painting gradually enlarged the central flower image and brought it closer to the edges of the canvas. Between 1926 and 1929 she painted a group of views of New York City. New York Night transforms skyscrapers into patterned, glittering structures that deny their volume. Most of these buildings were further simplified in her paintings and O'Keeffe was even able to find tranquility in them that contrasted with the urban environment. The city was a major theme in her work only between these years. During this time she produced some twenty-five paintings and drawings of urban scenery. This paintings are divided into three registers: the darkened water towers and irregular rooflines of the east side of Manhattan, the calm waters of the East River, and the jagged piers and smoggy covered factory smokestacks of Long Island City. It was a trip to New Mexico in 1929 that led O'Keeffe to the semiabstract style for which she became famous. The region's dramatic mesas, ancient Spanish architecture, vegetation, and desiccated terrain became her themes. She thought of bones as whitened relics and symbols of the desert, nothing more. Georgia O'Keeffe changed her style of painting to bones. In her picture From the Faraway Nearby, she paints a pair of elk's antlers suspended in a pinkish-blue dawn over some snow-capped mountains. Like the other pictures of skulls in the sky, this one also seems to have been painted from an elevated point, as if the artist herself was levitating on a shimmering desert heat wave. This picture reminds some people of the "joyful promise of everlasting life in the message of the Christian Resurrection" (Lisle 234). In the paintings of bones compared to her earlier works, her colors are less strident, forms are less, and overall the mood is more serene. More light than before is taken into the canvas and there is now a larger sense of spaciousness. These pictures lacked a mid...