Georgia O'Keefe

Georgia Totto O’Keefe was born in a farmhouse on a large dairy farm near Sun Prairie, Wisconsin on November 15, 1887. When she was twelve years old she told a friend, “I’m going to be an artist.”

Georgia had formal training as an artist at both the Art Institute of Chicago as well as the Art Student League in New York City. It is here that Georgia met a man named Alfred Stiegliz who owned an art gallery. He would later play an important role in promoting her art.

After she finished school, Georgia accepted a teaching position in Texas. She worked in Amarillo, Texas as an art teacher. It was during this time that her artwork started to look very unique. Georgia found beauty in everyday objects.

Alfred convinced Georgia to leave her teaching position and return to New York where she could paint full time. It is here that she began to paint her very large flowers. These became some of her most famous paintings. “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,” she said about her paintings.

In 1924 Alfred and Georgia were married. They moved into an apartment on the 30th floor of a hotel. With her spectacular view, Georgia began to paint the city.

In May 1929, Georgia visited friends in Taos, New Mexico. She thought the desert was beautiful. Georgia began painting animal bones, mountains and desert flowers. Alfred did not want to move to New Mexico, but he agreed Georgia should work there.

She traveled back to New York a few months out of every year. When Alfred died in 1946, Georgia moved to New Mexico and spent the rest of her life there.

Georgia died in 1986 at the age of ninety-eight. She will be remembered always for capturing the beauty of ordinary objects.



Art Exercises to try at home:

1. Pick a single flower and place it in a vase. It could be a sunflower, a tulip, a rose, or any other favorite. Paint a picture of it using your entire piece of paper. Try to capture all of the small details. Use bright, vivid colors.

2. Go outside and pick up three ordinary objects. Arrange them on a table and paint a still-life picture. Georgia O’Keefe found beauty in everyday objects that most people would not consider beautiful. See if you can do the same thing.

3. Take your paper and paints outside. Paint a picture of something you find beautiful. It could be tree bark or dead leaves. It doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks. Georgia O’Keefe painted pictures of rocks and bones. People thought she was crazy. Now her paintings are famous worldwide. So, paint something you find inspiring.

4. You are going to create an enormous flower. You will need ten sheets of blank paper, a magnifying glass, a flower, a pencil and crayons. Using the magnifying glass, study each part of the flower. Now do ten separate drawings of individual parts of the flower. You might draw several petals in one picture and the center of the flower in another picture. Put all of the pictures together to create one huge picture of a flower.

5. Paint a picture of a sky, only a sky. Your sky will be entirely covered with oval clouds. Georgia did not paint light, fluffy clouds in her sky picture, but rather a more geometric shape. She painted what she could see from her New York apartment window.