Georgia O'Keefe

Georgia O'Keeffe

Georgia O'Keeffe was one of the first major painters in American art. Being one of the first artists she stayed true to her style and didn't fall into what everyone else was doing. Georgia O'Keeffe was the second born out of seven children. Her birth date was November 15, 1887. O'Keeffe's parent's names were Francis Calyxtus and Ida (Totto) O'Keeffe. She was the first girl born into the family. In her first fourteen years of her life she grew up living in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin on the family farm. Growing up on the farm she needed the two brothers and five sisters to keep the farm looking good. The farm was a 640 acre dairy farm.

When Georgia was in the eighth grade she asked a daughter of a farm employee what she was going to do when she grew up. The girl said she didn't know. Georgia replied very definitely...

"...I am going to be an artist!"--"I don't really know where I got my artist idea...I only know that by that time it was definitely settled in my mind (p 3-4)."

When it was time for her to go to high school, she continued her education in Madison, Wisconsin and Chatham, Virginia. Her school in Madison was called Sacred Heart Academy. O'Keeffe had to live in Madison with her aunt because her family moved to Williamsburg, Virginia. Eventually, Georgia moved to be with her family in the spring of 1903. In that fall she started her second high school called Chatham Episcopal Institute. Through high school she never received any proper training on how to be a good artist. Her lessons didn't take place until she went to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Arts Students League in New York. O'Keeffe started off at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1905 and ended up in the fall of 1907 at the Arts Students League. At both of these schools she learned the form of the Europeans. That is when the students would draw from plaster casts and live models and even painted still-life arrangements. In the years to follow she continued her education in art classes at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville and at Columbia University's Teachers College in New York. At these schools she learned more different teaching methods and design theories of Arthur Wesley Dow and his follower Alon Bement.

In 1908 she gave up on painting and decided to pursue a job as a commercial artist in Chicago. While there she was going to draw lace and embroidery for advertisements. She leaves that job because her eyesight became poor because of the measles. O'Keeffe never thought that one day she would be a good artist so, she decided to be an art teacher. Her first experience as a teacher was being a substitute for her early childhood mentor, Elizabeth May Willis. After that she was all over the place teaching art and to different aged children. The places she taught were in Texas, Virginia, and South Carolina from 1911 to 1918. When she taught at Columbia College in South Carolina she produced a series of charcoal drawings, which later on started her career as an artist. This career started off because these drawings drew the attention to photographer, editor, and New York gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz. Stieglitz also happened to be her husband. They got married on December 11, 1924 before the justice of peace in Cliffside Park, New Jersey.

Throughout her years she won many awards for her paintings even though her eyesight was poor. In 1971 she lost her central vision only leaving her with her peripheral sight. For fifteen more years she lived without her vision and passed away on March 6th, 1986 at Saint Vincent's Hospital in Santa Fe.

I chose to do my paper of Georgia O'Keeffe because I liked her style of art. It was very intriguing to the eye to see how she could produce such a good piece of art with a skull and a flower. All of her pieces are very soft and peaceful. My favorite pieces that she produced were the ones of flowers. The petals that she painted were really realistic like they were actual flowers. She not only had one type of flower, but there were every different type of flower. My personal favorites were the petunias, white calla lilies, and the magnolias. In 1929 she painted a picture of an Iris flower. That is one of my personal favorites. She used different shades of purples and that happens to be my favorite color. O'Keeffe's paintings were mostly all done on canvas and with oil paints. I think that she used oil paints because they gave a stronger look with the color and color what was one of the most important things to her. To be honest some of the skull paintings that she painted scared me to look at them. For instance the painting titled Head with Broken Pot scared me. It was a human skull with teeth missing, placed inside this pot. There was a red background with a blue sky. O'Keeffe does an excellent job in capturing all the views of the skulls. She does the shading very well and makes it look like a true skull.

Georgia O'Keeffe's paintings were always done on the finest canvas and with the best paint and she always used very good brushes. She bought the best quality art supplies no matter how much it cost. She was always very organized with her paints. Whenever she made a new color that she liked she would put it on a clean piece of cardboard or paper and she would write how she'd made it.

Georgia O'Keeffe's first paintings were more serious and realistic, and in 1908 she won the William Merrit Chase still-life prize with her painting called "Dead Rabbit with Copper Pot". After that she progressed into doing some charcoal drawings that really expressed her feelings. This style of art was a lot different from what her previous pieces of art were. Once she moved on from her charcoal drawings she decided to go to art school to become an art teacher. While she was there her teacher, Alon Bement, taught her how to do more abstract paintings. That changed her style quite a bit. After school was over she moved to New York and started painting her huge flower paintings that helped make her famous. They were a mixture of her styles.

Georgia O'Keeffe painted many subjects during her career. The two main subjects she painted were flowers and bones. Georgia liked to paint bones because of their beautiful shape, curvy lines, form, smooth texture, and calming color. She thought they were a very