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She Won Our Hearts with Flowers

© Tricia Dake

Georgia O’Keeffe has become one of America’s favorite artists. It is perhaps due to the fact that she is truly an American artist. Unlike so many of her contemporaries, O’Keeffe did not travel to Europe to be influenced by the art found there. Instead she traveled to American destinations to experience the environment of the country of her birth.

Born in Wisconsin, she grew up amid traditional mid-Western values, but still she was independent. The move to Virginia at age 16 only served to make her more so. She wasn’t influenced by the expectations on young women in Southern culture. She never sought to try to prettify herself in any delicately feminine way. Instead she was confident always to just be herself.

Trained in Chicago and New York schools of art and taught by artist-teacher William Merritt Chase, O’Keeffe nevertheless found and adopted her own artistic style. There can be no doubt that the professional support of photographer and connoisseur of the arts Alfred Steiglitz, owner of 291 (an art gallery) and later O'Keefe's husband, was what initially brought her to public attention. Neither should there be a doubt that it was her own genius that kept her there.

O’Keeffe painted in no style but her own. Her influence was nature itself. For many years, her summers were spent not in painting but in experiencing the American countryside, so that during the colder winter months she could produce beautiful and vibrantly colorful works of art.

Many art critics have claimed to see her famous flowers as sexual symbols and her bone paintings as studies in barrenness – all ideas which she categorically denied as applicable or relevant. I cannot say I care one whit if the paintings have sexual implications or not. It doesn’t matter to me at all. As far as I am concerned, art critics are welcome to discuss it among themselves till the end of time. I love the paintings either way. I love them quite simply for their beauty – me and so many others.

I can stand and study her careful brushstrokes for hours. It is her exquisite skill that give the flowers that appearance of a velvety texture so true to life. I like to stand and contemplate how each painting would look if hung at a different angle – for O’Keeffe didn’t sign her paintings, thereby leaving us the option of hanging them any way we choose. Her Pansies, Poppies, Morning Glories, Lilies, Tulips, and Petunias - not to mention the Lawrence Tree - mesmerize me. But I’m not alone. When I attended “The Poetry of Things,” an exhibit of her work, the room was filled with people just like me admiring the beauty of her art.

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