O Keeffe

            During the early twentieth century, women suffered from discrimination and inferiority. An exception to this case was Georgia O'Keeffe, who captured the attention of the world with her paintings. She was the only female of her generation to be accepted as a professional artist. Art critic Henry McBride noted, "Mona Lisa got but one portrait of herself worth talking about, O'Keeffe got a hundred.Everybody knew the name. She became what is known as a newspaper personality." Georgia O'Keeffe knew exactly what she wanted from life and was not frightened to reach out for it. She left her mark in an artistic field believed to be exclusively for men.
             Georgia Totto O'Keeffe was born in 1887 in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. She was a well-behaved, self-disciplined child. At a very early age she decided where life was going to lead her: she was going to be a painter (Berry 23). Not taking in consideration her family's opinion, O'Keeffe started to sketch.
             One of her first sketches was of a man bending over. She worked on this piece for quite a while, trying to get the position of the legs correctly. But when she turned the drawing upside down, she noticed that the man looked fine with his legs up in the air. O'Keeffe recalled, "I thought it a very funny position for a man, but after all my effort it gave me a feeling of real achievement to have made something-- even if it wasn't what I had intended.".
             After graduating from college, O'Keeffe set out to the southwest taking up jobs as an art teacher in different schools and universities. Her journey in Texas and its surrounding states during the years of 1912 to 1916 helped O'Keeffe define her personal style of painting. She spent a great deal of time exploring the wild, empty spaces. She observed the shapes found in nature and translated them into very personal abstractions (Berry 39). O'Keeffe found her greatest inspiration to be the landscapes of this vast and colorful region.