Some exhibitions stay with you for years. The traveling Georgia O'Keeffe exhibition I saw at the de Young Museum in San Francisco back in May 2014 is one of them. My family and I made the trip together, and more than a decade later I still think about what I saw that afternoon.
The curator made a bold and effective choice: lights dimmed, a spotlight on each painting. It created an intimacy that a brightly lit gallery rarely achieves. You were not just looking at the work. You were inside it. To be in the presence of so many O'Keeffe paintings at once, spanning decades of her life and practice, was something I feel genuinely lucky to have experienced.
What struck me beyond the paintings themselves was how the exhibition wove her voice throughout the space. Her quotes on the walls pulled you into her personality as much as her brushwork did. And Georgia O'Keeffe had a personality worth knowing. Sharp, dry, completely uninterested in pretense.
One quote stopped me:
"I hate flowers. I paint them because they're cheaper than models and they don't move."
Georgia O'Keeffe
I laughed out loud. I used models in my own work, and there is something deeply relatable about that pragmatic, slightly exasperated logic. She was not romanticizing her subject matter. She was solving a problem, and in solving it, she created some of the most iconic paintings of the twentieth century. That combination of humor and creative rigor feels very true to how serious work actually gets made.
What connects me most to O'Keeffe is not any single painting but the sheer relentlessness of her output. She painted into her nineties. She moved to the New Mexico desert and let the landscape reshape her entirely. She did not slow down or soften. She kept going, kept looking, kept finding new things to be obsessed with. That desire to endlessly create, to never feel finished with the act of making, is something I carry with me in my own studio practice every day.
Seeing a retrospective of that scale in person is irreplaceable. No book or screen reproduces the scale, the surface, the presence of an O'Keeffe painting. I left the de Young feeling recharged and a little humbled, which is exactly what great art should do.
For those closer to New Haven, the Yale University Art Gallery currently has an O'Keeffe on view in its galleries, a quieter but no less rewarding way to spend time with her work.
This visit also planted a seed I have not forgotten: to visit the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum and see the Abiquiu landscape that shaped the last and perhaps most powerful chapter of her work.
If you have never seen her work in person, I cannot recommend it enough. And if you are a painter, or anyone who makes things for a living, her story is a reminder that the most important thing is simply to keep going.
Geometric Mountains from My Studio
O'Keeffe's landscapes, her obsession with the American West and its elemental forms, have been a quiet influence on my own geometric mountain paintings. If her work resonates with you, these pieces from my studio may as well:
- Answers Found, 40x80 Geometric Mountain, a large-scale work exploring depth and horizon
- Vista, 30x30 Geometric Mountain Painting, a neutral minimalist take on the mountain form
- Sunshine Days, 20x20 Abstract Mountain, a smaller piece with warmth and light
Browse all geometric mountain paintings.
Artist Series
This post is part of an ongoing series on artists who have shaped my practice. Each post explores a different figure whose work, ideas, or creative philosophy has left a mark on how I think about painting. Recent posts in the series include:
