Georgia O'keeffe example essay topic

"Nobody sees a flower, really, it is so small. We haven't time - and to see takes time like to have a friend takes time. If I could paint the flower exactly as I see it no one would see what I see because I would paint it small like the flower is small. So I said to myself - I'll paint what I see - what the flower is to me but I'll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking time to look at it - I will make even busy New Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers... 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".

- Georgia O'Keeffe "The circumstances of her life are not the example. It is the abstracting- as with the flowers, bones, the simplicity-that should be the example, the abstract continuity of unseen patterns and clues, culled in perhaps unrecognizable form at first, but revealing, when examined, a simple clarity, wholeness". (Taylor Patten) Georgia O'Keeffe a woman whom no one really knows the whole truth about is one of the most renowned artists of the twentieth century. No one really knows when and where she was born, she has never told anyone too much about her private life. Even people closest to her did not know what sort of a person she really was and what she really felt inside. People know small pieces of her life, they know certain facts, but not all of them, most information about her past comes from thorough research and not directly from O'Keeffe.

People have tried to patch her life up with facts. She led a very private life and tried to be secluded from the world not wanting people to know much about what had happened to her, if anything. Lots of what people think happened to her as a young girl were presuppositions and may or may not be true. Georgia O'Keeffe once said in an interview "The meaning of a word - to me - is not as exact as the meaning of a color. Colors and shapes make a more definite statement than words. I write this because such odd things have been done about me with words.

I have often been told what to paint. I am often amazed at the spoken and written word telling me what I have painted. I make this effort because no one else can know how my paintings happen. Where I was born and where and how I have lived is unimportant.

It is what I have done with and where I have been that should be of interest". 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. However I will be concentrating on her flower paintings, which were done during her first phase of painting which began in 1912, when she met a man by the name Alfred Stieglitz, who was famous German photographer.

Art historians have largely accepted the view that O'Keeffe's art was shaped by Alfred Stieglitz and the work of the European modernists she encountered under his tutelage -- a view actively encouraged by the famous photographer himself. 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 (see Appendix 1), she encircles a "blue vaginal void with pulsating waves of rippling pink and white". The first reaction that most people would get by looking at it, would be that it represented a woman's genitalia.

There is always so much that you can get from a picture, but many people get different things out of each painting. Everyone that looks at a paining will definitely have a different interpretation of what they see. The white sizing under the smooth surface makes the colors laminate 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 rise with gray edges. The warm colors and lines are controlled yet fluid. As the title tells, an inner and outer harmony is reached. Colours that the artist uses is very important, each colour represents a mood, idea etc. we could say that the pinks that Georgia uses and the other primary colours, could be sort of childhood memories. But of course these are just assumptions and unless we hear it from the artist herself we will never know for sure. Another one of Georgia O'Keeffe's flowers, the Black Iris, is noted for its sensual suggestiveness, but she insisted that she was representing the flower itself and never admitted that she had drawn it to look anything but.

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, was how Georgia explained her flowers. Georgia O'Keeffe 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 hated being called a feminist and resented the fact that her critics had said so much abut her art that she disliked. 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.

This was her stage in her life when she met with Stieglitz. He was 23 years her senior, and was thought to have been a sort of father figure to her. Stieglitz wrote an article emphasizing what he saw as the interest of her work from the point of view of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud and his ideas about sex and psychology were also new. Other critics found O'Keeffe's pictures to be symbols of female sexuality, even pornographic, despite the lack of realism. Georgia O'Keeffe was thought to have been "sexually abused" by her father as a young child". She had most likely been molested by her father".

Freud believed that girls who had been molested as children, grew up looking for older men who could be a father figure, this was the Oedipus Complex. He was also the reason why O'Keeffe had her first exhibition, when he first saw O'Keeffe's work he knew that she would later on become famous. However, She seemed to have a problem with sharing her artwork with the general public, or anyone at all. Perhaps it was because she put so much of herself into her drawings and paintings; her sexuality, her confidence, fears, experiences, and hopes. At first, the relationship between him and O'Keeffe was innocent; a patron and artist, a student and teacher, or perhaps even a father and daughter. Stieglitz's obviously paternalistic role could have been a substitute for the role Georgia's father played early in her life.

O'Keeffe began to model for Stieglitz's camera, and an enormous portfolio of breathtaking nude photography emerged after many years of accumulation. Of course, Alfred's wife Emmy did not find it particularly breathtaking to come across the pair in the middle of a sitting. Georgia had not been the first woman the older man had had an affair with, and this time his marriage was over for good. Stieglitz and O'Keeffe cohabited cramped New York City studio apartments, most often occupying separate beds.

They had a strange relationship which consisted of similar intellects, much stubborn and violent argument, and an artistic partnership where each fed off the other's creativity. Many biographers suggest that they were simply together because it was convenient and mutually beneficial, and they had few emotional ties. After all, why would a woman who had such lesbian tendencies suddenly attach herself to a man of such strong personality who seemed to dominate her? Stieglitz was a demanding hypochondriac who always needed care, right up to his dying day. Theirs was an unusual union, and after he passed on, Georgia continued her life in earnest.

This is far from the entire volume of Georgia O'Keeffe's lifetime. It was a long, frequently lonely life, even when she was surrounded.