force and mystery, and these images applaud life and beauty. They were among her most optimistic and successful works of art.Between 1926 and 1929 O'Keeffe painted a group of views of New York City. New York Night transformed skyscrapers into patterned, impressive structures that deny their volume. More architecturally characteristic were such paintings as Lake George Barns and Ranchos Church, Taos. These simple buildings, further simplified in her painting, were America's anonymous folk architecture; in these forms O'Keeffe found a durability and stillness that contrasted with the frenetic urban setting.Influenced by the Southwest, in 1929 O'Keeffe began spending time in New Mexico; that region's dramatic mesas, ancient Spanish architecture, vegetation, and dried out terrain became her constant themes. Even her metaphors of death in the desert—a sun bleached skull lying in the sand or affixed to a post as in Cow's Skull with Red were eternalized. She regarded these whitened relics as symbols of the desert, nothing more. “[Sun-bleached bones] were most wonderful against the blue -- that blue that will always be there as it is now after all man's destruction is finished.”(O’Keeffe, pg 103) To her, they were strangely more living than the animals walking around. The dried animal bones and wooden crucifixes of the region that loom in her desert Black Cross, New Mexico were unsettling visions. In 1945 O'Keeffe bought an old adobe house in New Mexico; she moved there after her husband's death in 1946. The house served as a frequent subject. In paintings such as Black Patio Door and Patio with Cloud details of doors, windows, and walls were drastically reduced to virtually unmodified planes of color. Many of O'Keeffe's paintings of the 1960’s, large-scale patterns of clouds and landscapes seen from the air, reflected a romanticized view of nature, reminiscent of her early themes. It Was Blue and Green that use...
