MINDSET LEADER
Georgia O'Keeffe became one of the most recognizable American artists of the twentieth century, but the development of her work involved a period in which she deliberately moved away from much of what she had been taught.
She had received serious formal training. She studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Students League in New York and won the League's William Merritt Chase still-life prize in 1908. By conventional measures, she was doing well. But O'Keeffe became dissatisfied with academic realism and eventually stopped painting for a period. When she returned to making art seriously, she began experimenting with a different question: what would she make if she stopped trying to work according to the established conventions she had learned?
In 1915, while teaching in South Carolina, she began a series of abstract charcoal drawings. The National Gallery of Art describes this period as a deliberate rejection of much of her previous instruction. O'Keeffe retained her technical knowledge but began trying to develop a visual language that felt like her own. A friend sent some of those drawings to photographer and gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz without O'Keeffe's knowledge. Stieglitz exhibited them in New York in 1916 and gave her a solo exhibition the following year.
The important part of that story is not simply that O'Keeffe rejected convention. She had spent years learning how to make art before deciding that technical correctness was not enough. She needed to determine what she actually wanted to see.
Learning the rules and developing judgment are different skills
Education is useful because it gives us access to knowledge other people have already accumulated. O'Keeffe learned technique, materials, composition and traditional drawing and painting. She did not develop her work in an intellectual vacuum.
But there is a point at which learning what other people consider good can interfere with discovering your own judgment.
This happens well beyond art. You learn what a successful career is supposed to look like, which clothes are flattering, what a good home should contain, which books intelligent people read, what kind of relationship is desirable and which ambitions are respectable. Much of this information is genuinely useful. Some of it prevents us from having to learn everything from scratch.
The problem begins when expertise in other people's standards becomes a substitute for preference.
O'Keeffe's early development illustrates the difference. She had learned how she was supposed to draw. Eventually she wanted to know how she would draw.
The National Gallery describes the resulting 1915 and 1916 charcoal abstractions as a significant break in her development. They were not produced because O'Keeffe lacked training. They appeared after she had enough training to recognize that following it was no longer producing the work she wanted to make.
There is a useful distinction here between rejecting something because you do not understand it and rejecting it after understanding it well enough to decide that it does not suit you.
The second is judgment.
She paid attention to what held her attention
O'Keeffe's subjects were often ordinary. Flowers. Hills. Bones. Trees. Buildings. Clouds. Doors.
Her paintings made these things unusual partly through scale, cropping, color and abstraction. She was interested in what happened when something familiar was looked at closely enough that it stopped feeling familiar.
Her explanation of the flower paintings is particularly useful because it has been preserved in her own words. O'Keeffe observed that flowers were small and that people rarely took the time to really look at them. "To see takes time like to have a friend takes time," she wrote. Her solution was to paint what she saw at a much larger scale so that busy people would have to stop and look.
This is partly an artistic decision. It is also an observation about attention.
Most people move through an enormous amount of visual and psychological information every day. Very little of it receives sustained attention. We see the same streets, people, objects and routines repeatedly until familiarity makes them almost invisible.
O'Keeffe built work around the opposite behavior. She noticed something small and stayed with it.
That capacity matters because preference often reveals itself through repeated attention. What do you keep looking at? What subjects do you return to without being told to? What details do you notice that other people seem to pass over? These are small pieces of information about how your mind works, and they are easy to dismiss because they do not initially look important.
She resisted other people's interpretations of her work
O'Keeffe's flower paintings became famous partly because critics interpreted their enlarged organic forms as sexual imagery. O'Keeffe repeatedly rejected that interpretation.
In her own account, she explained that when viewers looked closely at her flowers they brought their own associations with them and then wrote about the paintings as though those associations belonged to her. She was explicit that they did not.
The distinction is interesting because an artist loses some control over meaning once work enters the world. People are free to interpret what they see. O'Keeffe could not prevent critics from reading sexuality into her paintings. But she did not have to adopt their interpretation of her own intentions.
That is a useful distinction outside art as well. Other people will form explanations for your choices. They may decide that you moved because you were running away, pursued something because you wanted attention, remained single because you were afraid of commitment, changed careers because you failed or wanted something because you were insecure.
Sometimes outside observers notice things we have missed. Sometimes they are simply projecting their own framework onto someone else's life.
Self-knowledge does not require assuming that your own interpretation is always correct. It does require remembering that other people's interpretations are not automatically more accurate simply because they are external.
She allowed place to affect who she became
O'Keeffe first visited New Mexico in 1929, when she was in her early forties. The landscape became central to her work and eventually to the structure of her life. She returned repeatedly, spending increasing amounts of time there while maintaining her relationship and professional ties in New York. She purchased a house at Ghost Ranch in 1940 and another property in Abiquiú in 1945. After Stieglitz died in 1946, she eventually moved to New Mexico permanently in 1949.
The move is interesting because O'Keeffe did not treat the life she had already built as permanently binding. New York had been extraordinarily important to her career. Stieglitz had exhibited and promoted her work for decades. By the late 1920s, her paintings of skyscrapers and flowers had made her one of the best-known American modernists.
Yet another environment gave her something she wanted. The desert provided different subjects, different light, different space and a different daily experience. Animal bones, adobe architecture, mountains and the New Mexico landscape entered her work and remained there for decades.
Where you live is not merely the backdrop to a life. Environment determines what you see every day, how you move, whom you encounter, what is easy to do and what kind of attention your surroundings invite. Sometimes changing an environment changes what becomes available in you.
O'Keeffe seems to have recognized that and continued returning to the place where her attention became especially active.
Solitude was part of the work
O'Keeffe's life in New Mexico has contributed to an image of her as radically solitary, and the reality was more complicated. She maintained friendships, professional relationships and a long marriage. She corresponded extensively with Stieglitz while they were apart. More than 5,000 letters passed between them over the course of their relationship.
But she clearly valued periods of solitude. A surviving 1943 letter from New Mexico describes getting up with the sun and taking a long walk alone beneath the cliffs. She notices the temperature, the shadows, flowers and even a rattlesnake coiled in her path. She considers killing it, decides it is too beautiful to disturb and continues walking.
It is an ordinary account of a morning, but it reveals the quality of attention behind the paintings. There is space in it.
Solitude can be useful for this reason. It removes some of the continuous social information that tells you what other people are interested in, what they expect and how they are responding to you.
That does not make solitude inherently superior to company. People also learn enormous amounts about themselves through relationships. But without any periods of separation, it can become difficult to determine which thoughts are yours and which have simply become familiar through repetition.
She built a recognizable identity without trying to follow a category
By the mid-1920s, O'Keeffe had become recognized as a major American artist. Her work would eventually be discussed in relation to modernism, abstraction, precisionism, regionalism and surrealism, but she never fit neatly into a single movement. The National Gallery notes that although she was associated with Stieglitz's circle, she was not formally attached to one particular artistic movement.
Her work was recognizable because certain interests kept recurring. Scale. Shape. Space. Color. Natural forms. Abstraction. The relationship between an object and the feeling it produced in her.
She once described the challenge this way: "I had to create an equivalent for what I felt about what I was looking at, not copy it."
That is a precise description of having a point of view. Two people can look at the same thing and notice different information. They can experience the same city, relationship, book or landscape and leave with different impressions.
The objective is not necessarily to make your interpretation unusual. It is to make sure you have actually formed one.
Independence did not mean being uninfluenced
It would be easy to turn O'Keeffe into a story about ignoring everyone else and following your instincts. Her actual development is more useful than that.
She had teachers. Arthur Wesley Dow's ideas about composition had an important effect on her artistic development. Stieglitz gave her early work an audience and promoted her career for decades. Other artists influenced her and she participated in a broader modernist culture. Her environments changed what she painted. Critics affected how the public understood her work even when she disagreed with their conclusions.
Nobody develops a point of view without influence. The question is what happens after the influence arrives.
You can absorb an idea and decide it is useful. You can try something and abandon it. You can admire someone's work without reproducing it. You can learn a convention and eventually reject it.
Independence is not the absence of influence. It is retaining enough judgment to decide what you do with it.
What Georgia O'Keeffe's life suggests about knowing what you like
People are often encouraged to know themselves in large categories. What are your values? What career do you want? Where do you want to live? What kind of relationship do you want?
Those questions matter. But self-knowledge also develops through smaller acts of attention.
Which painting do you keep returning to in the museum? Which room makes you want to stay? Which landscape changes your mood? Which clothes feel most like you? Which subjects make you curious enough to keep reading? What do you notice when nobody has told you what is worth noticing?
Over time, those preferences accumulate.
O'Keeffe's career demonstrates what can happen when someone takes their own attention seriously enough to build around it. She learned technique and then questioned it. She listened to interpretations of her work and disagreed when they did not match her experience. She encountered a landscape that mattered to her and reorganized her life so she could spend more time in it. She kept returning to subjects other people might have passed without noticing.
None of this requires believing that your first instinct is always correct. Taste develops. Judgment improves. Exposure changes preference. Something you once disliked may become important and something you once wanted may eventually feel irrelevant.
The point is to participate in that process consciously.
You can spend a life becoming very good at recognizing what other people consider beautiful, impressive or desirable. It is also worth learning what you see.