May 9, 2023
Watercolor is the perfect medium for O’Keefe to render sunlight and naked flesh - casual, posed, or imagined. All O’Keefe needed were willing subjects, her paint box, and a supply of watercolor paper soaked in just the right amount of water to let her colors merge into each other then into the viewer’s imagination.
Georgia O’Keeffe captured the contours of the female form in a halo of of azure, turquoise, or umber colors reminiscent of Native American beadwork which in turn mimicked their sense of kinship with nature’s palette of the southwest landscape.
Washes of pale early morning blue or deeper High Plains midday blue wrap around her nude female subjects. O’Keefe intentionally exaggerates darker fleshy skin tones to center the image in the composition. I can almost smell her subjects skin soaking up the sun.
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