Do the colors of the work remind you of anything you have seen in your life or travels?
Georgia O’Keeffe was greatly inspired by the natural scenery during her visits to Lake George, New York. In this piece, O’Keeffe uses pinks, oranges, and greens in a range of dark and light shades. In several other pieces from O’Keeffe’s Birch and Pine Trees series, autumnal colors like red and orange are used to indicate foliage, as in the bright orange in the upper left corner of this work.
Consider the title of the piece: Birch and Pine Trees—Pink. Do the colors and shapes that may at first seem unfamiliar take on a different meaning in light of the title?
O’Keeffe often used natural imagery to represent her own emotions and events in her life. O’Keeffe has alluded to the fact that Birch and Pine Trees—Pink was actually a surrogate portrait of her friend, the prominent African-American author Jean Toomer, who was one of the visitors at her Lake George home during the summer of 1925. She described it in a letter to him, as "a painting I made from something of you the first time you were here."
O'Keeffe was an American modernist painter, and one of the characteristics of that tradition was experimentation. Is there anything that feels experimental and modern about what you're seeing in this painting?
O'Keeffe's depiction of nature was quite different than earlier artists working in the landscape tradition. Compared to landscapes that showed an illusion of depth, her canvases tended to look flatter—a modernist tradition. Her choice of colors and mix of sharp lines and hazy sections led to a work that, while certainly reminiscent of birch and pine trees, also had a more dreamlike quality.
