Abstraction Blue, 1927 by Georgia O'Keeffe

From 1914 through the late 1920s, O'Keeff's paintings are characterized largely by the artist's own "looking inward" and her experimentation with various techniques espoused by teachers, fellow painters, or suggested by her extensive readings. Inspired discussions of the power of color by Wassily Kandinsky, particularly his psychological interpretations of red (as determined and powerful) and of blue (as spiritual and transcendent) greatly impressed O'Keeffe and when she turned from charcoal to color, and blue became and remained her color of choice.

In her Abstraction Blue, pure blue strokes are dramatically juxtaposed. The painting exemplifies the freedom O'Keeffe felt and the possibilities she explored at this time through art's most basic building blocks:

I found that I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say in any other way - things I had no words for.