Georgia Okeefe Essays (1156 words) - Georgia OKeeffe, Precisionism

Georgia O'keefe * Georgia O'Keeffe is one of the most influential artists there is today. Her works are valued highly and are quite beautiful and unique. As a prominent American artist, Georgia O'Keeffe is famous for her images of gigantic flowers, city-scapes and distinctive desert scenes. All of these different phases represent times in her life. Throughout the seventy years of her creative career, Georgia O'Keeffe continually made some of the most original contributions to the art of our time. As Georgia O'Keeffe's awareness of her sexuality heightened, she started to paint marvelous original abstractions in exuberant rainbows or colors. These colors seemed to celebrate her happiness. One of her paintings Music--Pink and Blue I, she encircles a blue vaginal void with pulsating waves of rippling pink and white. There is always so much that you can get from a picture. Everyone that looks at it will definitely have a different interpretation of what they see in it. The white sizing under the smooth surface makes the colors luminate in Music--Pink and Blue I. The two oval shapes bring out the sea, sky, and other images. The central form is a little more complex. The left archway uses blues and pinks alternately. On the inner edge of the arch, pink hues mix in to rose with gray edges. The warm colors and lines are controlled yet fluid. As the title tells, an inner and outer harmony is reached. Georgia O'Keeffe's Black Iris is noted for its sensual suggestiveness, but she insisted that she was representing the flower itself. She even flatly denied that the flower was a metaphor for female genitalia. O'Keeffe's flowers were painted frontally and revealingly had the effect of making the human beings who stood in front of them become smaller. The observer feels like Alice after she had imbibed the 'Drink Me' phial wrote a reviewer in amusement. The size of the bloom relative to a human really reflected the relative importance of nature and mankind in the artist's eyes. Georgia O'Kee ffe painted everything from lilies, jonquils, daisies, irises, sweet peas, morning glories, poppies, forget-me-nots, marigolds, poinsettias, orchids, sunflowers, petunias, marigolds, and many more were reborn in her paintings. O'Keeffe wasn't happy because people looked at her paintings and tried to see them in the way of a female. She said, Well--I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower you hung all your own associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower--and I don't. She did not like the idea that people thought she painted the way she did because she was a female. She painted that way because that was how she saw things. The flowers that she created epitomize her growth, success, magnetism, and energy at that certain stage in her career. Her choice to paint these flowers was influenced by her early training, natural attraction to flowers, and the id ea of something fresh and fragile. Close observations of O'Keeffe's flowers show that she never really pursued the realistic approach. She didn't paint every petal and detail. Instead she gave her flowers a life of their own, and expression that changed significantly between 1918 and 1938. Her red canna painting gradually enlarged the central flower image and brought it closer to the edges of the canvas. Between 1926 and 1929 she painted a group of views of New York City. New York Night transforms skyscrapers into patterned, glittering structures that deny their volume. Most of these buildings were further simplified in her paintings and O'Keeffe was even able to find tranquility in them that contrasted with the urban environment. The city was a major theme in her work only between these years. During this time she produced some twenty-five paintings and drawings of urban scenery. This paintings are divided into three registers: the darkened water towers and irregular rooflines of t he east side of Manhattan, the calm waters of the East River, and the jagged piers and smoggy covered factory smokestacks of Long Island City. It was a trip to New Mexico in 1929 that