Georgia O'Keeffe

OKeeffe (18871986) was born in a tiny Wisconsin town on the edge of the vast northern wilderness, and she never abandoned her rather rowdy Midwesternness despite her peripatetic life. She attended and then taught school in the South, rose to enormous success in New York, where her paintings awed critics and public audiences alike, and lived for nearly sixty years in New Mexico. There she refined the simplicity that reveals itself so powerfully in her art. Her images of bleached bones and austere deserts, her soaring cityscapes, her huge, erotically charged flowers, andperhaps most powerfully of allher gravely ecstatic landscapes speak with great force of the subtlety of her mind, the grace of her hand, and the thoughtful delight she found in the physical world.