Georgia O Keefe

Georgia O’Keeffe is one of the most known artists of our century, well known
for her contribution to modern art. She was born on November 15, 1887,
Georgia O’Keeffe grew up on a farm near Wisconsin. By the time she graduated
from high school in 1905, she had been determined become a world-renowned
artist. She experimented with abstraction while she taught art in West Texas.
Through a series of abstract charcoal drawings, she developed a personal
relationship with art to better express her feelings and ideas.
She mailed some of these drawings to a friend in New York City. Her friend was
so amazed of her talent and did not want her efforts to go to waste so, she
showed them to an art dealer and well-known photographer, who would
eventually become O’Keeffe’s husband. He became the first to show her work,
in 1916.
In the summer of 1929, she made
the first of many trips to northern
New Mexico. For the next twenty
years of her life, she spent most
summers living and working in New
Mexico. She made the state her
permanent home in 1949, three
years after her late husband's death.
Georgia’s New Mexico paintings
were becoming a worldwide favourite and in the 1950s, she began to travel
internationally. She painted and sketched works that represented the enticing
places she visited, including the mountain peaks of Peru and Japan’s Mount
Fuji. At the age of seventy-three, she took on a new subject, views of clouds
and sky. Suffering from almost utter blindness, she painted her last unassisted
oil painting in 1972. Late in life, and nearly blind, she enlisted the help of
several assistants to aid her to continue creating her art pieces. Georgia
O’Keeffe died