O'Keeffe in west Texas

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One of America's premier artists found her life's inspiration in the plains and canyons of the Panhandle.

Chance, as much as anything, steered Georgia O'Keeffe to the Southwest. Something much stronger, though-call it fate or circumstance or character-primed her for what she discovered there. Put simply, this artist found her landscape of the heart-and she found it first not in New Mexico, but in the sprawling Panhandle of Texas.

Like most unschooled fans of her work, I was surprised by that fact. I had always associated the artist with the sere high desert north of Santa Fe, New Mexico. Visiting the Panhandle, though, I now understand how the time she spent here inspired her vision and shaped how she would paint for the rest of her life.

Her Spiritual Home

O'Keeffe described Texas as her "spiritual home." When she was a child in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, her mother read to her on rainy days, Sunday afternoons, and most every night. The stories of the Old West romanced her independent spirit, and she deeply longed to see it.

In the fall of 1912 she did just that. For two years O'Keeffe supervised art in Amarillo's public schools, and while none of her paintings survives from that time, the place took hold of her soul. She loved the sheer geometry of the plains: its flat sweep of earth and the answering unbroken vault of sky, both scoured by wind and seared by sun. When she returned to Texas in 1916 to head the art department at West Texas State Normal College (now West Texas A&M University) in Canyon, the plains became her principal subject-those and nearby Palo Duro Canyon.

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.

From the Classroom to the Canyon

The Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum occupies a site near where O'Keeffe instructed in art. An exhibit set in a brightly lit corner of the second floor commemorates her time and work in Canyon. An old black-and-white photograph freezes her students in class. A yearbook portrait captures the 28-year-old artist: the high cheekbones; her dark, direct eyes; the heavy slash of her eyebrows; the slight half-smile she always seemed to wear. The true prize, though, is Red Landscape, one of only three oils she did while in Canyon.

The painting reflects what O'Keeffe experienced in Palo Duro Canyon-a landscape sculpted on a planetary scale and drenched in bold colors. It looked, as she remembered-- and painted--"a burning, seething cauldron, filled with dramatic light and color."

"It's an early Modernist painting by her," explains Michael Grauer, curator of art for the museum. "This is a seminal point in her career. When she got here, she was inspired by what she saw. The rest, of course, is history."

A Curious Slit in the Plains

Palo Duro Canyon was an irresistible magnet for the artist in O'Keeffe. She went there almost every weekend, scrambling down its talus slopes and exploring every inch she could walk. The formations, chiseled over millions of years by rain and flood, fascinated her. The mercurial light, igniting an entire spectrum of brilliant colors, captivated her. Everything about Palo Duro challenged her to paint it as she alone saw it.

"I wish you could see the landscapes I painted last Monday out where the canyon begins," she wrote to Anita. "You possibly remember that my landscapes are always funny and these are not exceptions-Slits in nothingness are not very easy to paint-but [it's] great to try..."