eorgia O'Keeffe knew at a very young age what she wanted to do with
her life. "I am going to be an artist," she told a twelve-year-old
friend. "It [is] definitely settled in my mind." Growing up in a
traditional farm family in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, was difficult
for a young girl bursting with energy, imagination, and unusual
ambition. She recalled feeling like an outsider in the family. Her
parents looked on her creative ways, she said, as if they were just
"more of Georgie's crazy notions. They never approved of me....
My mother and I never agreed. I got so I would just not talk about
the things I knew we would disagree about. I was going to be an
artist."
Her teachers recognized her prodigious artistic skills early on,
and channeled them into the norms and styles of the day- "imitative
realism," as it was called then. But her vision of the world and
how to paint it had little to do with what she was taught in school.
She got frustrated, left her studies, and soon found herself again
on the outside of the cultural norms. "I was taught to paint like
other people. I hadn't been taught a way of my own."
Until she met a teacher named Alon Bement in 1912. "His idea was
to fill a space in a beautiful way, which was a new idea for me,"
she said years later, still shaken by the intrinsic wonder of that
new idea....
