Technical Skills

Always the individual, Georgia O'Keeffe was unsatisfied if required to copy the style of another artist during her school years. As you view works of art created by O'Keeffe during the years she lived in Texas, consider how she developed and expressed her own innovative style. Below are some non-Texas works by her that demonstrate a realistic approach not usually associated with O'Keeffe.

Untitled (Dead Rabbit with a Copper Pot), 1908

Untitled (University of Virginia), 1912-1914

Untitled (Beauford Delaney), 1943

  • Pastel on paper
  • National Portrait Gallery
  • Georgia O'Keeffe wrote about Mr. Delaney in relation to another, charcoal work from the early 1940s. "I first met Beauford Delaney when he was posing for Mary Callery. I found that he was a painter and posed for others because he had no heat in his studio and needed to keep warm. He seemed a very special sort of person so I began drawing him too. I don't remember where I worked on him--maybe at Mary's--maybe in my own place. But I made several drawings and a couple of pastels of him." Some Memories of Drawings by Georgia O'Keeffe, edited by Doris Bry. Albuquerque : University of New Mexico Press, 1974, unpaginated, text accompanying Plate 15.