ficantly between 1918 and 1938. Her red canna painting gradually enlarged the central flower image and brought it closer to the edges of the canvas.Between 1926 and 1929 she painted a group of views of New York City. New York Night transforms skyscrapers into patterned, glittering structures that deny their volume. Most of these buildings were further simplified in her paintings and O'Keeffe was even able to find tranquility in them that contrasted with the urban environment. The city was a major theme in her work only between these years. During this time she produced some twenty-five paintings and drawings of urban scenery. This paintings are divided into three registers: the darkened water towers and irregular rooflines of the east side of Manhattan, the calm waters of the East River, and the jagged piers and smoggy covered factory smokestacks of Long Island City.It was a trip to New Mexico in 1929 that led O'Keeffe to the semiabstract style for which she became famous. The region's dramatic mesas, ancient Spanish architecture, vegetation, and desiccated terrain became her themes. She thought of bones as whitened relics and symbols of the desert, nothing more. Georgia O'Keeffe changed her style of painting to bones. In her picture From the Faraway Nearby, she paints a pair of elk's antlers suspended in a pinkish-blue dawn over some snow-capped mountains. Like the other pictures of skulls in the sky, this one also seems to have been painted from an elevated point, as if the artist herself was levitating on a shimmering desert heat wave. This picture reminds some people of the "joyful promise of everlasting life in the message of the Christian Resurrection" (Lisle 234). In the paintings of bones compared to her earlier works, her colors are less strident, forms are less, and overall the mood is more serene. More light than before is taken into the canvas and there is now a larger sense of spaciousness. These pictures l...
