Looking back, it's easy to see that everything this well-trained artist had studied and done before had prepared her for the pioneering work ahead. Her work indeed seems inevitable, but O'Keeffe needed the time and luxury to paint in isolation, free of naysayers. Clearly, too, the scenery--in some places startlingly spare, in others rugged and fabulously colored--afforded her imagery like none she'd ever known. It all coalesced in the Texas Panhandle. There she learned to make a landscape her own.

A Wonderful Emptiness
Canyon today is a metropolis compared to the little settlement that greeted O'Keeffe when she stepped off the train that early fall night. She said she could count all the houses in less than a half hour, but that didn't dismay her. Instead, she gloried in the country's strong lines and emptiness. Within a week, she wrote, in her peculiarly clipped style, to her friend Anita Pollitzer about the blazing sky and the ocean-like expanse of the prairie: "I am loving the plains more than ever it seems--and the SKY--Anita, you've never seen such SKY--it is wonderful..."

Driving through the flatlands that surround the town, I encounter the scenes that so appealed to O'Keeffe. I recognize all the shades of gold she celebrated in the land and see in the silhouette of this farmhouse or that windmill the echo of a form she put to watercolor. I am mesmerized with the arch and the reach of the sky and the unending parade of wind-frayed clouds.

She must have been gazing at a similar sight that morning decades ago when she began to brush strokes of maroon, orange, red, and cobalt blue onto canvas to create Sunrise and Little Clouds No. II. The result, a blend of abstraction and representation, demonstrates the synthesis she sought in her art. She aimed to paint what she felt for a subject as much as the reality of what she saw.