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.