Although she is a lot more famous for her oils, I think I like her watercolors just as well and maybe more. I remember seeing a room full of them at the O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe last year. They are tiny, many only about 10 x 12, and they date from the early part of her career when she was living in rural Texas, teaching art. Perhaps if you're not interested in clearing brush, making art might sound like a good alternative.

Evidently she had seen an exhibit of Rodin watercolors a few years earlier while living in New York, and had not forgotten them. At right is Rodin's Reclining Nude, 1900.

Here's another of Rodin's from his series of nudes. Uses line in a way O'Keeffe does not.

She takes a bolder approach, doesn't she? Above left is a somewhat larger piece- 18 x 13 1/2- part of Nude Series VII. What do you think? I really like the minimum of detail, lack of features, strong negative shapes; there's no concern for precise proportions (that big hand just feels right the way it is), but such sensitivity to those curves. I'm sure there's more that makes this work, but I can't put my finger on it.

Finding Your Style

“It was in the fall of 1915 that I first had the idea that what I had been taught was of little value to me except for the use of my materials as a language --charcoal, pencil, pen and ink, watercolor, pastel, and oil. . . . .But what to say with them? ....After careful thinking I decided that I wasn’t going to spend my life doing what had already been done.” Georgia O’Keeffe

When I went to the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe in May I was knocked out by seeing the confidence in her work. There is no equivocating. Even in her early watercolors, like the one above, she just puts that paint down exactly where she wants it and that's final.

Harry Truman used to say he was looking for a one-handed economist because he was tired of hearing "on the other hand." Sometimes I look at a painting in progress and feel it's been painted by someone with five hands. The style keeps changing, getting farther and farther from bold and clear.

Franklyn Liegel, former teacher of mine at Otis College of Art and Design, passed on a number of ideas I try to dredge up when struggling with style. The most helpful, I think, is to spend some time identifying what draws you in by looking at images you like as well as ones you hate. We were urged to spend some time with these images, from magazines, library books, whatever, not to get ideas to imitate, but to figure out where we like to be - with big shapes, fractured spaces, strong colors, whatever it might be.


Painted this alley diptych from a photo taken in Seattle after the trip to Santa Fe; I've have almost stopped changing it around.