Georgia O’Keeffe

Written By Helen Drew

Sky Above Clouds. Photo by Pippa Drew …The thrill of clouds floating at eye level brought to mind Georgia O’Keeffe’s mid-century sky paintings…

Flying back from Florida on a late May morning I felt unusually calm for a nervous flyer. As we began gliding to our connection in DC I was even relaxed enough to take photos of the sky. The thrill of clouds floating at eye level brought to mind Georgia O’Keeffe’s mid-century sky paintings which she created after her rise to fame, and when she could finally afford the time and money to travel the world. In February I’d read her biography, a story that spanned almost a century, and it animated a truly glum Vermont winter lacking the grace of white snow.

For years O’Keeffe had married herself to the land of New Mexico. The desert became her soulmate. But flying above the earth suddenly introduced untapped subject matter and brought forth a whole new series. Some of her sky paintings are huge as in the 8 ft. x 24 ft. Sky Above Clouds IV, 1963. This achievement in scale is remarkable since she was 77 years old at the time. The style also represents O’Keeffe’s uncelebrated juncture as a minimalist and color field painter in the context of post-war American abstraction when the US was a leading player in the world including in visual art. A male critic suggested Georgia imitated her male counterparts, outsized innovators such as Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko. But I believe she arrived at her minimalist period from a personal journey that began during the first two decades of the 20th century — when her originality unfurled across the world with her abstract charcoals, followed by sets of magnified flower paintings. Now here she is mid-century, one of the most hardworking and assertive artists that ever lived, showing nature’s vast reach — and sharing as humans do when they make art. See what I see.

Sky Above Clouds IV, 1963 Georgia O’Keeffe

Helen Drew