A post I wrote for Ferdinand Creative.

History often failed to acknowledge women’s achievements. In March, we celebrate Women’s History Month to honour the contributions of history’s most influential and revolutionary women.

“I found things I could say with colour and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way.” Georgia O’Keeffe, Some Memories on Drawings.

Georgia O’Keeffe was an American artist and is considered the mother of American Modernism. Born and raised in small town in Wisconsin, O’Keeffe formed an intimate relationship with the landscape that surrounded her at a young age. Her paintings include sweeping and sprawling landscapes of her childhood; they are intimate and personal. They are paintings of early America, and of her home.

O’Keeffe’s art is distinctive and bold; as is her use of artistic elements like composition, line and colour. Her paintings are powerful in their depths of colours, and the arrangement of common objects, like flowers and bones, in relation to the blues of the sky. O’Keeffe’s paintings were often criticisms of societally accepted norms and common beliefs. Her painting, the Cow’s Skull: Red, White and Blue, she made in response to other artists that claimed to be making quintessential American art. O’Keeffe painted the Cow’s Skull to show others and remind them of her America — which was across the Hudson River, a place where those artists hadn’t visited. As one of the first female artists in the US to receive national acclaim and recognition, her career had a profound impact on the Feminist art movement as a whole, and has paved the way for other emerging artists, like Judy Chicago and Miriam Shapiro.