From the Lake, 1924 by Georgia O'Keeffe

Here Georgia O'Keeffe pushes the landscape into abstraction, celebrating the rhythms and colors of the stormy Lake George country in a design that grows simultaneously from her more representational views and from her abstractions.

The dynamic arrangement of forms suggests the search for an abstract equivalent from the forces of nature that motivated O'Keeffe's pictorial imagination. Like Arthur Dove, her artistic soul mate, she tended to simplify natural forms, seeking to distill their essence over extended treatments of a motif. His early pastel Nature Symbolized was inspired by the experience of wind on a hillside, its movement over land and vegetation reduced to spiky arcs and comma shapes; with similarly elongated forms, O'Keeffe distilled the essence of storm sweeping over Lake George.

From such natural inspirations, grand or small, O'Keeffe derived the basis for her distinctive designs, compositions which mark the continuation of her abstract vision in the 1920s, even as she concurrently moved toward more representational views of the world around her.