d more vague color, and the painting technique was looser, with less dependence on sharp contours. These large paintings ended in a 24-foot mural on canvas, Sky above Clouds IV. A portrayal of O'Keeffe, In Cahoots with Coyote, from Terry Tempest Williams' 1994 book, “An Unspoken Hunger,” painted a vivid narrative of the artist's entrancement with the New Mexico she first visited in 1917. "I simply paint what I see," O'Keeffe is quoted as saying, from O'Keeffe's own essays published by Georgia O'Keeffe in 1987. O’Keeffe’s search for the ideal color, light, stones, parched bones that contained more life in them than living animals, transformed her trips into desert country into a communion with the perfection around her. Once, in a canyon bottom, she was so enthralled by the sight that she laid her head back Coyote-fashion and howled at the sky, terrifying her companions nearby who feared she was injured.” I can't help it — it's all so beautiful," was her response. Another, well-known story related by Williams was of O'Keeffe stealing a perfectly shaped, totally black stone she admired from the coffee table of friends. They had found it at a canyon riverbed during a search for stones moments before O'Keeffe arrived at the spot, but kept it tantalizingly out of her reach. Obsessed with the stone and seeing it on the table for her to steal if she wanted, she had no doubt thought she was the rightful possessor of such beauty. O’Keeffe’s paintings are hauntingly familiar, although they are of a design which is viewed as strange or elusive to most of us. Looking at her paintings, one feels as if they are near something that is strangely familiar to them, but yet so out of reach, it makes the mind wonder how this women has come to see these images and render them to canvas. Her insights and visions were monumental in the art world. Her textures and colors were contrasting yet complimentary. T...
