O’Keeffe was a painter who I believe forged a more original artistic language for landscape than that of anyone else in America at the time. She was always fascinated by the natural world, and the subjects of her paintings in the early years were of natural forms (flowers, trees, shells) and cityscapes filled with electrically lit skyscrapers. In 1929, when she began to spend summers in the high desert of Northern New Mexico, O’Keeffe turned to adobe churches, animal skulls and the vastness of the American Southwest – opening a new vocabulary for American art.
