Art Creation & Reflection – Georgia O’Keeffe’s Rust Red Hills (1930)

Art Creation & Reflection – Georgia O’Keeffe’s Rust Red Hills (1930)

Part 1: Art Creation

Select one of the visual art pieces from Chapters 1-6 or the lessons from Weeks 1-3 to use as a point of inspiration. (Attached)

Create a painting, sculpture, drawing, or work of architecture inspired by your selected art piece. (Also Attached)

Part 2: Reflection

Write a reflection about the relationship between your art production and the inspiration piece. Include the following in the reflection paper:

Introduction

Inspiration Piece

Include image.

Record the title, artist, year, and place of origin.

Briefly explain the background of the inspiration piece.

Your Art Piece

Include image.

Provide a title.

Explain the background of your piece. (However you see fit)

Connection

Explain the thematic connection between the two pieces.

How are they similar and different?

Are they the same medium? How does the medium impact what the viewer experiences?

How do the formal elements of design compare to one another?

Length: 1.5-2 pages (not including title page, references page, or image of artwork)

1-inch margins

Double spaced

12-point Times New Roman font

Title page

References page (minimum of 1 scholarly source)

Art Creation & Reflection – Georgia O’Keeffe’s Rust Red Hills (1930)

Art Creation & Reflection

This reflection considers my work in relation to Georgia O’Keeffe’s Rust Red Hills (1930), a work that profoundly impacted my own practice in creating the desert landscape. Considering both works in terms of theme, medium, and formal aspects of composition, I will draw out both similarities and differences between O’Keeffe’s representational depiction of the hills in New Mexico and my abstracted version of the same landscape. What will be uncovered in this essay is how these two works dialogue with each other through a practice of artwork.

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For this artwork reflection, my artwork is drawn from Georgia O’Keeffe’s Rust Red Hills, alternatively titled Hills – Back of Mabel’s, Taos, or Toward Abiquiu, New Mexico, done in 1930. Iconic American modernist painter Georgia O’Keeffe drew a lot of her inspiration from New Mexico’s landscapes, and many of her works feature such settings (Messigner, 2023). In this work, one can see the expansive hills of the desert, and in them, O’Keeffe captured both the beauty and brutality of it all. Rust, red, and muted browns convey the region’s heat and quiet, and the free, organic forms and waves that illustrate the natural rhythm of the earth. O’Keeffe’s work delves into an in-depth relationship with nature and how it constructs human perception of space and time (Messigner, 2023).

My own artwork on the other hand is an acrylic on canvas depiction of a similar desert environment, where it reflects my inspirations from O’Keeffe’s use of bold colors and reduced forms. In the painting, I have tried to capture the expansiveness and peacefulness of the desert, employing the same deep shades of red and terra colors, but in a more abstract and fractured manner. I have emphasized the rolling hills with geometric forms and structures, stylizing the natural environment, yet not losing its character.

The thematic overlap between both works is in a shared awe for the raw beauty of the desert. While O’Keeffe’s work is naturally and realism-oriented, my work is more abstract and reduces forms into definite forms (Messigner, 2023). The medium is also different in that O’Keeffe works with oil paint, with its smooth gradation and soft transition, and I work with acrylics, with its opacity and sharp contrast (Messigner, 2023). That variance in medium shifts the viewer’s experience, with O’Keeffe’s work having a fluid, immersive quality and my work having a more graphic, constructed one. There is a shared appreciation for a love of the desert, but a divergence in interpretation and realization through the use of medium and abstraction.

Reference

Messigner, L. M. (2023). Georgia O’Keeffe. Thames & Hudson. Revised 2
nd
Edition

Art Creation & Reflection – Georgia O’Keeffe’s Rust Red Hills (1930)