This week on Artist Rundown, we are going to talk about one of my favourite artists of all time.
Georgia O’Keeffe, born in 1887, was an American artist. She was best known for her paintings of enlarged flowers and zoomed in fauna, and also produced some beautiful New Mexico landscapes. Known commonly as ‘The Mother of American Modernism’, O’Keeffe influenced mass change in the American art world and was a trailblazer for the artists that we see as idols today.
In the year 1905, Georgia O’Keeffe was recognised for her talent and started to receive art training at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago and then moved on to the Art Students League of New York. She did however, feel constrained by her lessons because she did not wasn’t to just ‘copy’ what was in nature. Unable to pay for a further education, she stopped attending school in 1908, and started to work as a commercial illustrator. She then spent some years teaching in Virginia, Texas and South Carolina. In 1918, she moved to New York and began working seriously as an artist. This when her career started to ‘take off’.
Her paintings stand today as some of the most beautiful, successful and admired pieces of art around. In 2014, O’Keeffe’s painting ‘Jimson Weed’ sold for 44.5 Million dollars, more than three times the previous world auction record for ANY female artist. After her death the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum was established in Santa Fe, somewhere she often travelled to do her New Mexico landscapes.
I attached quite a few of her pieces below so you can understand my love for Georgia O’Keeffe, and how she defied the rules of nature in art, especially as a female. I saw her work at the TATE MODERN last year. #O’KeeffeEverday ❤️
