Georgia O'Keeffe Quotes

O’Keeffe grew up with six siblings on a Wisconsin dairy farm and received art lessons at home as a child. Throughout her school years, teachers recognized and cultivated her ability to draw and paint. Upon graduation from high school, O’Keeffe determined to become a professional artist.

She first attended the Art Institute of Chicago (1905–06), and then she went to New York City to study at the Art Students League. O’Keeffe quickly became proficient at imitative realism, the approach to image making that formed the basis of all standard art-school curriculum at the time, and in 1908 she won the league’s William Merritt Chase still life prize for her oil painting Untitled (Dead Rabbit with Copper Pot) (1908). However, because she believed that she would never distinguish herself as a painter within the tradition of imitative realism, she abandoned her commitment to being a painter altogether and took a job in Chicago as a commercial artist.

While with her family in 1912, O’Keeffe attended a summer course for art teachers at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, which was taught by Alon Bement of Teachers College, Columbia University, in New York City. Bement acquainted her with the then-revolutionary thinking of his colleague at Teachers College, artist and art educator Arthur Wesley Dow. Dow believed in the Modernist idea that the subject of artists’ work should be their personal ideas and feelings and that these could be visualized most effectively through the harmonious arrangement of line, colour, and notan (the Japanese system of arranging lights and darks).
Georgia O'Keeffe, (born November 15, 1887, near Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, U.S.—died March 6, 1986, Santa Fe, New Mexico), American painter who was among the most influential figures in Modernism, best known for her large-format paintings of natural subjects, especially flowers and bones.