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

• Oil on canvas
• Permanent Collection of The Art Students League of New York
• This painting won O'Keeffe the League's Chase Still Life Scholarship.
• Also of interest is the League's portrait of O'Keeffe painted in 1907-1908.
• Photograph from the Photograph Archives, Smithsonian American Art Museum. Click to enlarge image. Available from the Collections Search Center, Smithsonian Institution.

Untitled (University of Virginia), 1912-1914

• Watercolor on paper
• Watercolor from the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Collections Online.

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.