The Phenomenon of Georgia OKeeffe - Research Paper Example

With the combination of thin paint and her natural ideas put O'Keeffe years ahead of her time. O'Keeffe ancestors were of Irish and Hungarian origin. She grew as a thoughtful child who did things in a manner that was her own way. She decided to become a painter at a very early age and she said "That was the thing I can do the best because that was nobody else's business." Georgia O'Keeffe was a teenager when she moved to Williamsburg with her parents. At Williamsburg she attended the CPEI "Chatham Protestant Episcopal Institute" from where she graduated in the year 1905.

In 1907 she joined Art Institute at Chicago and in the same year she also joined the Art Students League at New York. Her artistic ability developed when she started to draw the paintings using oil paint on the piece of canvas. She made a famous oil painting of "Dead Rabbit with Copper Pot." As a result scholarship was awarded to her and it was an early indication of O'Keeffe being a genius. (Weingarten, & Higgerson, 2001) This gave Georgia a sense of achievement as she felt her work very different from the other still painters of her time and the ones before her.

For a very brief period she worked as a freelance commercial artist in the city of Chicago. Later she became an arts teacher at Chicago and considered this work to be more pliable. In the year 1914, she became supervisor of art for all the public schools in the city of Amarillo, Texas. In 1920 she became head of the department of art at the College of Normal in Canyon, Texas. (Weingarten, & Higgerson, 2001) In this period O'Keeffe stop painting for a while and studied the art theories of "Arthur Wesley Dow" who was a famous lecturer of art at the University of Columbia.

Georgia learned to find and create two dimensional reality in pictorial art. Dow also taught her that these realities must be based on pure aesthetic principles and taught her that composition of pictorial art should be abstract and it must be based on color, line, dark masses and light, symmetry and repetition. O'Keeffe also learned that all these things are important along with solitude, state of isolation and emotional ferment. Georgia O'Keeffe Life in New York Georgia O'Keeffe had a boyfriend with whom she had a conflict over something and that gave her some personal touch in the field of art.

All these factors contributed in starting full time painting once again. She experimented with watercolors, oil paints and also the drawing using charcoal. In 1915 Georgia mailed few of her charcoal drawings to her friend who lived in New York. These charcoal drawings brought her artistic immortality. The reason for this was that her friend showed these drawing to Alfred Stieglitz, who was a renowned photographer. Alfred Stieglitz exhibited all these drawing at "Art Gallery 291" on 5th Avenue in New York.

These drawing drew the attention of general public. As a reticent person O'Keeffe went to New York to oppose the display of her drawings and demanded an immediate removal. However Stieglitz persuaded her and he wanted these paintings to remain and also wanted her to continue her carrier for her own interest in abstract designs. (Reily, 2007) The designs used by Georgia were bud-like forms which where rounded and jagged between undulating