Georgia O'Keeffe: Watercolors

Georgia O’Keeffe: Watercolors catalogs nearly 50 watercolors created by O’Keeffe between 1916 and 1918, while she lived and taught in Canyon, Texas. Designed to emphasize direct contact with these beautiful works, Watercolors features full-scale color reproductions of the paintings, most of which are approximately 8 x 12 inches in scale, offering a powerful testament to the significance of the watercolors in O’Keeffe’s creative evolution. Accompanied by a lengthy essay by West Texas A&M University scholar, Amy Von Lintel, it features archival photographs of O’Keeffe during this time period. This catalog is a must-have for any admirers of O’Keeffe work!

The years O’Keeffe spent in Canyon, Texas mark a period of radical innovation for the artist, during which she firmly established her commitment to abstraction. While her work in Texas is often understood as merely a prelude to her career in New York City, these watercolors and drawings mark a seminal stage in O’Keeffe’s artistic formation, representing the pivotal intersection of her disciplined art practice and her allegiance to the revolutionary techniques of her mentor, Arthur Wesley Dow.

O’Keeffe’s watercolors explore the texture and landscape of the Texas desert and the artist’s own body in an exceptionally fragile and sensitive medium, representing a substantial achievement in their own right. These early works also relate to O’Keeffe’s large-scale oil paintings, which in their handling of color and texture in some ways seem to aspire to the condition of watercolor.