Georgia O'Keefe was an artist with a passion for art and a great innovative mindset, an important figure in the development of modernist art in the United States and a pioneer of the feminist art movement.
A prolific painter, O'Keefe created more than 2,000 paintings during his lifetime. Although her artistic style is often classified as precisionism, her highly expressive and striking paintings often drift between figurative and abstract edges, making it difficult to classify them precisely into a style.
Born in Wisconsin, Okiffer attended the Art Institute of Chicago from 1905 to 1906, moving to New York in 1907 under the tutelage of the Art Students Union painter William Merritt Chase. While studying in New York, Okeeffer also frequented photographer Alfred. Stiglitz's 291 Gallery visits the exhibition, which at the time was one of the few galleries in the United States to exhibit avant-garde European art.
The formation of O'Keefe's artistic style was influenced by many different styles of art, including Rodin, Matisse, Art Nouveau, Arthur Wesley Dow, and Arthur Dove. Dove's influence on Okeeffer was the biggest.
The American painter Arthur Dove uses a language of abstract colors, shapes and lines to interpret the natural world in his paintings. He is also an amateur musician, so he can find inspiration for the intersection between visual art creation and music composition.
Dove is considered to have been the first artist in the United States to create purely abstract paintings. He often used Cubist-style block compositions in his paintings, while he also used soft colors to represent organic organisms in American nature.
Dove was also a member of Stiglitz's avant-garde art scene, having his first solo exhibition at Stiglitz's gallery in 1912. Dove's artistic style has always influenced O'Keefe's artistic work, especially his sense of rhythm through shape and color. Under the influence of his example, Okeeffer often combined abstract and realistic elements in a single picture.
In 1915, Okiffer read Kandinsky's On the Spirit in Art, and she began to use Wesley Douglas's theory of self-exploration in the form of art.
She painted simplified sketches of natural objects with charcoal that also showed Stiglitz her potential, so he exhibited 10 of them in his gallery. Stiglitz gave O'Keefe a lot of financial help so that she no longer had to teach for a living, and they later married in 1924.
O'Keefe created many large-format works with rich colors, in which the objects depicted are close-ups of natural objects, as well as New York skyscrapers and other architectural structures.
The brightly colored painting above is one of the large floral close-ups that O'Keefe created in the early years after his marriage. The bold, fluid lines in the painting combine her striking colors with a novel composition.
Explaining her reasons for choosing such a close-up perspective to depict flowers, she said: "No one has really seen a flower because it is so small. We don't have enough time to make such observations, and if I paint a flower in this way, then no one will look at the painting, so the painting will be very mediocre. So I said to myself — I would draw the flower I saw, but I would also draw it very large so that others would be attracted to the picture and willing to take the time to look at it, and I would even have busy New York City people stop and look at the flower in my eyes. ”
O'Keefe has publicly denied criticisms that suggest these floral works contain deep themes, especially those who describe her work as a symbol of sex, and she clarifies that she is only depicting the flowers she sees, which is only a way for her to observe nature.
She also used photographic techniques in her creations, such as cutting edges and distorting the distance between the foreground and the background.
Okeeffer's use of color gives the picture a strong emotional force, which gives life to the bright red poppies in the picture. Although I don't know if she has a sense of synesthesia, she does have a strong interest in this feeling, and her perception of color is also very sensitive. Here, she uses a similar color in a small range of the spectrum, mostly dazzling red, and then some orange and yellow. At the same time, she also depicts the central part of the flower in black, purple and blue.
The curved shapes and lines in the painting reflect O'Keefe's obsession with Art Nouveau. At the same time, the asymmetrical composition of the work also reflects the ideas she acquired from the art of Japanese printmaking.
In addition, she uses some negative space at the edges of the petals and the position of the flower buds to emphasize their shape. Her accurate arrangement of the contrast between dark and bright colors in the painting also highlights the asymmetry of the composition.
Okeeffer simplified the entire composition, and she only depicted two flowers leaning against each other on the pure red base of the painting, so that no other element could affect them.
At a time when many artists were trying to create abstract paintings, Okeeffer always insisted on creating figurative paintings. Although the painting is a direct sketch of two oriental poppies, through subtle changes in lines and colors, changes in the angle of observation, and the use of color, shape and texture, she gives the picture a pictorial effect and a sense of abstract form.
Okeefor first mixed a large amount of turpentine with lead white and painted a thin white background on the canvas. Then she uses very thin layers to depict it step by step. The red and yellow in the picture are almost transparent, while the white and black are opaque. After the color of some of the petals' edges dried out, she thinly depicted some highlights on them with drier white pigments.
At the same time, the black and purple of the flower buds are also depicted in drier, thinner colors, but they are slightly more layered than the white highlights.
The lines that O'Kiefe outlines the petals and the outer outline of the flowers also give the picture a sense of vitality. These smooth lines surround the entire composition like a stream of water, giving the work a simple, pure feel.
Early training in painting made Okifur take sketching very seriously, and she always used sketchbooks to record her keen observations. Her representation of the lines also reflects her "selective, exclusionary and emphatic approach to expression, which always evokes the viewer's impression and emotional resonance."