The Yellow Flower

Okay so one of the ideas I have been toying with to possibly use for my senior seminar has something to do with taking things we are typically familiar with, and even by which we recognize people (specifically their facial features), and cropping in so that they look more abstracted designs than the features we are used to.

On that train of thought, who better to look to for inspiration in cropping in and abstracting familiar things than Georgia O'Keeffe. Specifically I am referring to her flower paintings. Actually she was really my inspiration for the technique in this new possible idea for senior sem.

Red Canna

O'Keeffe was an American artist, who started out in Wisconsin and finished her memorable life in New Mexico. She went from a farm in Wisconsin, to the Art Institute of Chicago, and other places such as taking classes at UVA in Charlottesville, and teaching classes at Columbia College in South Carolina. An influential person in O'Keeffe's art was Arthur Dow, who said "the goal of art was the expression of the artist's personal ideas and feelings and that such subject matterwas best realized through harmonious arrangements of line, color, and notan (the Japanese system of lights and darks)" (www.okeeffemuseum.org).

Along her journey, she met Alfred Stieglitz, a man who shared her heart for art, and encouraged and supported her in her development as an artist. They eventually got married and lived in New York. It was in New York where she worked on her huge flower paintings.

Poppy

Her later works reflected her love for New Mexico, in the animal skulls and desert landscape portrayed in them. However, the works that I want to look at in this blog, is her paintings of flowers.

I love how even though it's more difficult to recognize the flowers, themselves, the paintings and compositions are still aesthetically pleasing.


 -Maria

http://www.okeeffemuseum.org/biography.html

White Flower