A Look at….Georgia O’Keeffe
We’re delighted to welcome visiting tutor David ‘DJ’ Johnson to teach
O’Keeffe Flower Painting on 22nd July at Pegasus Art
Book your place online and enjoy a day in her shoes painting enlarged flowers. Learn about O’Keeffe, focus on composition, colour mixing, stamens, leaf and petal textures and new techniques.
We asked the artist how O’Keeffe has inspired his own work and why he’s excited to inspire others through this workshop. (Include Q&A)
How much do you know about Georgia O’Keeffe?
Did you know that her middle name was Totto? Born in 1887, O’Keeffe is known as ‘The Mother of American Modernism’ – she was a ground-breaking artist, confounding social stereotypes, forging her own distinct path in life. Bolder than her peers, she was a frontrunner for contemporary art and modernist vision.
Early career
Moving away from formal representation early in her career, she quickly grasped the principles and philosophies of Arthur Wesley Dow interpreting subjects in your own style rather than copying them. This was a major shift in the way she approached her art as seen in her early watercolours and charcoal studies of 1915 that led to total abstraction. It was these charcoal abstracts that effectively launched her career. By the age of 30, she’d exhibited these drawings and was teaching at Columbia University.
Moving to New York
A life changing relationship came in the shape of Alfred Stieglitz, an art dealer and photographer, who championed her work. He persuaded her to move to New York in 1917 to focus on her painting in a more serious way. They married in 1924 at a time when O’Keeffe was producing her Red Canna flower paintings and exploring female sexuality through explicit and sensuous photographs.
The canna lily paintings
The canna lily paintings where intended to depict the way that she saw flowers. As a gardener, O’Keeffe was passionate about flowers and focused on their details. Others brought their own interpretation to these paintings, seeing them as representations of female genitalia, but the artist always insisted this wasn’t the case. Rejecting the male gaze and Freudian psychology, she had simply abstracted the flower and harnessed energy through vivid colour.
Finding peace in Santa Fe
The artist was an elusive character and sought periods of solitude at different times of her life. Drawn to the South West, O’Keeffe started spending time in New Mexico which provided space and creative inspiration for her landscapes. Paintings like ‘Cow’s Skull: Red, White and Blue’ and ‘Ram’s Head White Hollyhock’ and ‘Little Hills’. After Stieglitz’s death, she lived permanently in New Mexico in Aiquiu and then Santa Fe until her death aged 98.