Georgia O'Keeffe Inspired Paintings

Georgia O'Keeffe (1887 – 1986), a major figure in American Art from the 1920’s on, received widespread recognition for her technical contributions, as well as for challenging the boundaries of modern American artistic style. She is primarily known for paintings of flowers, rocks, shells, animal bones, and landscapes of the American Southwest in which she synthesized abstraction and representation. Her paintings present crisply contoured forms that are full of subtle tonal transitions of varying colors. She often transformed her subject matter into powerful abstract images by monumentalizing, enlarging and cropping her subjects to fit her canvas. She stylized (simplified) her shapes and modeled their edges, often creating abstract patterns.
Seventh graders were challenged to create an acrylic painting on canvas using O’Keeffe’s techniques and her favorite subjects as inspiration- zoomed in flowers, shells and skulls (which we borrowed from the LS science room!). Some chose to paint more abstractly while others chose to be more representational. Every student focused on gradually blended bright colors, bold shapes and the intricate structure of their chosen forms.