If you love the art of Georgia O’Keefe, you’ll love the picture book My Name is Georgia written and illustrated by Jeanette Winter (1998, Harcourt). I picked this picture book up in Santa Fe when I was visiting the Georgia O’Keefe museum there. It’s a very simple biography of the artist from her days as a girl to art school in Chicago and then New York: “At school, I painted my teacher’s ideas. But when school days were over, I went out into the wide world to discover my own ideas.”
Georgia paints the Texas sky, the sunset and clouds. She paints flowers: “I painted a camellia. I painted it BIG, so people would notice. I painted a jack-in-the-pulpit. I painted it BIG, so people would see.”
Then she goes to the New Mexico desert. Georgia again finds things to paint: bones, deserts, mountains, and again the sky. And in her last painting, she painted the sky. “I painted my sky BIG, so people would see the sky the way I did.”
Georgia O’Keefe lived to be ninety-eight years old. To my mind, her art seems particularly accessible to children. It has a childlike immediacy and boldness of form and color that appeals to them. So take your kiddo to the art museum then come home and read My Name is Georgia.
This looks like a really terrific book! I’ve always been interested in artists’ perspectives on their chosen profession and their work, and this is one picture book I’ve not heard of before. Gives me a great idea for a future post on my .
Great stuff! Keep it coming.