American modernist painter Georgia O’Keeffe is best known for her meticulously rendered, large-scale depictions of flowers and stark desert landscapes — Oriental Poppies, serene Calla Lilies, fiery Red Canna, deer skulls and wildflowers floating above the horizon.
A fiercely independent nonconformist, O’Keeffe created abstract distillations of natural forms that gained international recognition and confirmed her stature as one of the most significant artists of the 20th century. O’Keeffe took a personal and provocative approach to art, seeking to create an equivalent of what she felt she was looking at, rather than merely copying it.
In their gorgeous new picture book, Gifts from Georgia’s Garden: How Georgia O’Keeffe Nourished Her Art (Neal Porter/Holiday House, 2024), Lisa Robinson and Hadley Hooper focus on how O’Keeffe’s art-centric lifestyle as a sustainable gardener fed her muse and enabled her to flourish as a painter. Deeply inspired by place and environment, Georgia believed everything was art, and art was everything.
The book opens with Georgia at her easel, painting “flowers so lush and large they filled the canvas.” This microscopic perspective enabled the viewer to appreciate a flower’s minute details. She hoped to make people in the city slow down and take the time to really see the beauty that she saw.
But Georgia grew tired of New York and fled to New Mexico, where she felt free amidst its canyons, mesas and skyscapes. The scent of the soil reminded her of growing up on a farm in Wisconsin, where she had developed her “love of wide skies and sweeping vistas.”
The golden shimmer of a field of wheat;
rectangular rocks, twisted sticks, oval leaves;
barns with haylofts, windows, and doors.
Early on, she knew she wanted to become an artist.
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