Georgia O’Keeffe
was a famous American artist,
who specialized in painting
large, colourful drawings of flowers up close.
Photo Credit: Bob Marquart via Compfight
She was born in 1887
in Wisconsin in the USA.
Photo Credit: Tsega Dinka via Compfight
She lived on a farm,
with nature all around.
As a child she didn’t like school,
but she loved art
and by the age of ten
she knew she wanted to be an artist.
She moved to Virginia
when she started secondary school.
Her drawings were greatly admired
by her friends and her teachers.
After leaving school,
Georgia went to art college in Chicago.
But she got seriously ill with typhoid.
When she recovered, over a year later,
she went to study art in New York.
In 1912, she returned to Virginia
to continue with her studies
Georgia became an art teacher.
She experimented with painting
in many different ways
before she developed her
own special way of painting.
In 1916, a photographer named Alfred Stieglitz
put some of her paintings in his gallery without telling her.
At first Georgia was upset, but she forgave him.
Alfred Stieglitz helped make Georgia’s paintings famous.
They got married.
They bought a house on a lake
They lived there during the summers.
It was here that Georgia began painting
the close-ups of flowers in bright, bold colors
that she is now most famous for.
Photo Credit: rocor via Compfight
This was new. We see lots of pictures like this now.
But at the time, only photographers had taken pictures like this.
No-one had ever painted such detailed close-ups of flowers before
In her later life Georgia moved to New Mexico.
She painted the desert,
the mountains,
and the adobe houses.
She especially loved to paint pictures
of desert landscape and animal skulls.
Photo Credit: Jimmie via Compfight
She continued to paint until she lost her eyesight.
She was ninety-eight years old when she died in 1986.
Photo Credit: Barbara via Compfight
We first learned about Georgia O’Keeffe’s
when we saw her famous painting, ‘The Lawrence Tree’.
We painted our own trees inspired by her’s HERE.
