Light Iris

This week, The Art Fix is focusing on Georgia O’Keeffe and her legacy to Art. Georgia O’Keeffe was an American painter born in 1887. Strict and self-disciplined, she knew that she was going to be a painter since she was a kid. Her formal art training at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago was not ideal.

“I was taught to paint like other people and I knew that I’d never paint as well as the person that I was taught to paint like. ”

Georgia O’Keeffe

It’s hard to find this level of self-knowledge, let alone in a young artist. Georgia O’Keeffe was self-assured and hard-working. No wonder she was so successful. Her large scale flower paintings like Light Iris (pictured above) are little (or should I say big?) modernist miracles.

Even though, flowers were a very common theme for women artists at the time, Georgia O’Keeffe would have hated to be limited by her female identity. In fact, the constant sexualization of her paintings by many art critics and her own peers, including her life companion, Alfred Stieglitz, drove her decision to start expanding her work to themes such as New York.

As you can see in Light Iris, O’Keeffe was a master of colouring. Along with that, she was excellent at transforming a simple subject matter such as a flower to impressive abstracts who transcend the basic reproduction of an image often found in nature that most of us would have tried to create. This is only one of the three works by Georgia O’Keeffe that we are going to showcase this week. Stay tuned for the other two, coming on Wednesday and Friday. If you like our content, make sure to subscribe by filling in the form below so that you can be notified for every new article we post!