Georgia O'Keeffe

Georgia O'Keeffe is known for her brilliantly colored paintings with confident shapes and simple patterns. She painted a great many floral paintings which were large pieces with the flower exaggerated and enlarged to completely fill the canvas, then stylized to their most essential forms. She is also known for her Southwest paintings which include adobe buildings, desert mountain panoramas or floating cow skulls against rich blue skies. The emphasis on the simplest aspects of the shapes created a surrealistic dynamic that is captivating. O'Keeffe was born on November 15, 1887 in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin.

Beck Strand was a friend who invited O'Keeffe on a trip to Taos New Mexico at a time when the artist was craving new scenery to paint. Steiglitz didn't like travel and firmly stayed in New York except for occasional uncomfortable forays elsewhere with O'Keeffe. She spent all her summers in Taos from then on, and when Steiglitz died in 1946, she moved there permanently.


She purchased a hacienda at Ghost Ranch, New Mexico and it became her lair for much of the remainder of her life. Her eyesight began to fail in the early seventies and by 1972 she could no longer see well enough to paint. A young man named Juan Hamilton, a potter, came to do odd jobs for O'Keeffe and ultimately became her closest companion in her later years. Many felt he was using her for his own ends, but O'Keeffe liked him and he stayed. She even did a bit of pottery herself while knowing him.


At the very end of her life she moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico. It was there that she died in 1986 at the age of 98. She was cremated the next day and Juan Hamilton scattered her ashes from Pedernal Mountain as she had requested.