Crossing the line between abstraction and representational art, Georgia O’Keeffe experimented with color and form. Born in Wisconsin, she discovered the Southwestern landscape in 1912 while teaching in Amarillo, Texas. In 1929, the painter bought a ranch in the bare desert of New Mexico. Entranced by the land that surrounded her, she often painted outdoors, sleeping in a tent and wearing gloves to work on cold days.
In Red Hills with White Shell, oil paint floats like translucent watercolors. The red and yellow of the sky and white of the shell are strong, clear colors uninterrupted by black outlines or shadows. Instead, O’Keeffe connects the forms through white highlights, which create a subtler link between the objects than black outlines. The focus of the work, a nautilus shell, is magnified in scale to dominate the composition. The setting—red, arid hills, barren of grass—was visible outside her New Mexican door. In this work, O’Keeffe softened the hills to appear fluid; they appear to melt into the ground, yet still support the large shell. The burst of yellow along the skyline is reflected gently on the shell. The artist, who coveted her grandmother’s collection of seashells as a young girl, collected seashells from her travels around the world and used them as a recurring theme in her paintings.
A large portion of O’Keeffe’s work features organic objects—such as shells, flowers, and animal bones—as central themes. She once said of her work, “Nobody has seen a flower...really...it is so small…we haven’t time—and to see takes time...I’ll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking time to look at it.” O’Keeffe painted images in nature that symbolized her emotions. Here, the hill and the shell create an image that is mysterious and monumental, yet intense. The spiral pattern within the shell yields a serene feel, while the sweeping red hills in the background create a charged space. In enlarging the typically miniature shell, O’Keeffe provides her viewers with an intimate and emblematic image of the shell. However, the shell can also be viewed as a study in the spiritual relationship between the human psyche (the shell) and the natural world.
O’Keeffe rarely prepared advance drawings for her paintings, instead choosing to work directly on the canvas. Unlike other 20th century artists, O’Keeffe was more interested in the final product than in the process of creating art. Her distinctive style began with a single subject, such as a shell, which she altered and simplified, resulting in a study of line, shape, form, and color. American art during the first quarter of the 20th century was slowly evolving from the figurative to the abstract. Like a handful of American artists and photographers of the time, O’Keeffe was not directly influenced by European art. Instead, she aspired to create abstract compositions based on her own observation of nature. O’Keeffe’s approach was personal, and her work was a symbol of her own unique American experience.
