“From The Plains I” by Georgia O’Keeffe 11×14 Print

This painting expresses O’Keeffe’s spiritual and emotional ties to the West Texas landscape. In 1916, while she was teaching in Canyon, Texas, O’Keeffe wrote a letter to Alfred Stieglitz: 

“The plains – the wonderful great big sky – makes me want to breathe so deep that I’ll break – There is so much of it….It seems so funny that a week ago it was the mountains I thought the most wonderful – and today it’s the plains – I guess it’s the feeling of bigness in both that just carries me away…”

O’Keeffe’s fascination with vast landscapes became even more evident in the 1930s when she spent summers in New Mexico, eventually moving there permanently in 1949. Emotional and artistic expansiveness endured in the magnificent New Mexico landscape paintings for which O’Keeffe is renowned.