Style Imitating Art: Sky above Clouds IV by Georgia O’Keeffe

Serendipity happened again this week with the Style Imitating Art prompt. I had photographed this particular outfit the day before the curated artwork was announced. As I sat down to edit the photos with my newly saved laptop wallpaper that is the chosen artwork, I quickly noticed that I could not have styled a better representation of the painting even if I had tried. When serendipity happens, I do like to just roll with it. So let’s get right to it…

About Style Imitating Art

Style Imitating Art is hosted by Daenel of Living Outside the Stacks, Salazar of 14 Shades of Grey, and Terri of Meadow Tree Style. Style Imitating Art challenges us to draw style inspiration from pieces of art. Every other Monday, one of the hosts, acting as curator, selects an inspiration image that they will each post on their blogs. The following Monday, each host shares her art inspired outfit. Participants are invited to submit their art inspired outfits to the curator by 10:00 p.m. EST on the Tuesday following the hosts’ art inspired outfit posts. The following day, Wednesday, the curator will share all of the submissions on her blog.

You don’t have to be a blogger to join! You are invited to share your images on Instagram or other social media platforms! Just be sure to tag Salazar, Terri, and Daenel or use  #TeamLOTSStyle  and  #StyleImitatingArt so the hosts know you have joined. Go have some fun in your closets and join the SIA challenge next week!

The Inspiration Artwork

The inspiration artwork was curated by Daenel of Living Outside the Stacks. You can read why she has chosen this specific piece as her inspiration artwork here.

Sky above Clouds IV by Georgia O’Keeffe (Oil on Canvas, 1965)

About the Artist: Georgia O’Keeffe

Georgia Totto O’Keeffe (November 15, 1887 – March 6, 1986) was an American artist who is recognized as the “mother of American modernism” in the world of art. She is best known for her paintings of oversized, enlarged flowers, New York skyscrapers, and New Mexico landscapes.

O’Keefe was born in 1887 in a farmhouse in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, to dairy farmers. She was the second of seven children. With her sisters Ida and Anita, O’Keeffe began receiving early art instruction at the age of 10 from local watercolorist Sarah Mann. In 1902, the O’Keeffe’s moved from Wisconsin to Williamsburg, Virginia, because her father wanted to begin a business making rusticated cast concrete block in anticipation of a building trade demand that never materialized.

O’Keeffe began her formal art training in 1905 at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago followed by further training at the Art Students League of New York. In 1908, she ran out of funding for her art education and took a two year stint as a commercial illustrator. Between 1911 and 1918, O’Keeffe taught in Virginia, South Carolina, and Texas while studying art herself during the summers between 1912 and 1914. Over the following few years, O’Keeffe continued teaching and studying art at the Teachers College, Columbia University. In 1917, art dealer and photographer Alfred Stieglitz held the first exhibition of her works. At Stieglitz’s request, O’Keeffe moved to New York in 1918 to pursue a career as a serious artist. The professional relationship between O’Keeffe and Stieglitz eventually grew more personal which led to their marriage in 1924. He was 24 years her senior.

Throughout her lifetime, O’Keefe’s art and style went through different periods and transitions. During her early years in New York, she created many different forms of abstract art including close ups of flowers which many critics have found to represent female genitalia. Although O’Keeffe consistently denied that intention in her Red Canna paintings, this idea that she depicted female sexuality in her works was fueled by explicit photographs of herself that Stieglitz took and exhibited.

In 1929, O’Keeffe began spending part of the year in the American Southwest which inspired her paintings of the New Mexico landscape. After Stieglitz’s death in 1946, O’Keeffe settled permanently in New Mexico until her death in 1986. In 2014, one of her paintings sold at auction for $44,405,000, three times more than the previous world auction record for a female artist.

O’Keeffe struggled with mental health issues and was hospitalized for two months in 1933 after learning of her husband’s affair with Dorothy Norman which caused her to have a nervous breakdown.

In 1973, O’Keeffe hired 27 year old potter Juan Hamilton as a live-in assistant and caretaker. During his 13 years of employment with O’Keeffe, Hamilton taught her to work with clay and assisted her with writing her autobiography. Following her death in 1986, the O’Keeffe family contested her will which left her entire $76 million estate to Hamilton. The case was eventually settled out of court in 1987 and became a famous legal precedent in estate planning.

At her request, O’Keeffe was cremated upon her death and her ashes were scattered on the land around Ghost Ranch in Santa Fe. After her death, the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum was established in Santa Fe.

Beginning as early as the 1920’s, Georgia O’Keeffe was a legend in her own time garnering much respect as a female role model for her independent spirit and her dramatic and innovative works of art. She is one of the most significant artists of the 20th century.

About the Art: Sky above Clouds IV (1965)

In the summer of 1965 at the age of 77, O’Keeffe painted this oil on canvas as the final culmination of a series of paintings that were inspired by her experiences as an airplane passenger in the 1950s. Around 1963, she began to artistically capture the never ending expanse of clouds that she observed from airplane windows during her world travels. Her first piece in this series was a relatively realistic depiction of small white clouds on a 36″ x 48″ canvas. As she continued with this series of cloud paintings, the images became more stylized and the canvases became larger. This fourth and final piece in her series, Sky above Clouds IV, is a mammoth 8 feet high by 24 feet wide.

“I painted a painting eight feet high and twenty-four feet wide—it kept me working every minute from six a.m. till eight or nine at night as I had to be finished before it was cold—I worked in the garage and it had no heat—Such a size is of course ridiculous but I had it in my head as something I wanted to do for a couple of years.”

Georgia O’Keefe

In 1970, the painting was scheduled for exhibition as part of a retrospective of O’Keeffe’s work at various art museums. After being displayed in New York and Chicago, it was determined that the painting was too large to enter the doors of the San Francisco Museum of Art and so it remained on loan at the Art Institute of Chicago for more than a decade while arrangements were made to make it a permanent piece in the museum’s collection.

During O’Keeffe’s world travels, she described the changing patterns and colors of the sky views from airplane windows as breathtaking and was subsequently inspired to interpret these images and the emotions they ignited through paint on canvas. In this piece, she used pastel blues and pinks to cover two thirds of the gigantic canvas with her stylized white cloud pattern. The cloud pattern ends at a traditional horizon line that fades into bands of various pastel shades. The repetition of the cloud motif as it approaches the horizon transforms the canvas into an abstract composition that hovers somewhere between pattern and landscape.

Sky above Clouds IV was purchased with funds provided by the Paul and Gabriella Rosenbaum Foundation as well as a gift from the artist herself and remains a permanent fixture in the Art Institute of Chicago’s museum collection.

Resources:

• Wikipedia: Georgia O’Keeffe
• Wikipedia: Alfred Stieglitz
• Wikipedia: Red Canna (paintings)
• About Georgia O’Keeffe
• The Art Institute of Chicago: Sky above Clouds IV
• Sky Above Clouds IV, 1965 by Georgia O’Keeffe
• Sky Above Clouds IV, The Landscape, and O’Keeffe’s Artistic Language
• Wikipedia: Georgia O’Keeffe Museum

About My Outfit Inspired by Sky above Clouds IV

As I mentioned in the beginning of the post, I had styled and photographed this outfit before the art prompt was announced. I really could not have come up with a better outfit interpretation if I had seen the painting first. The tie dye pattern on my sweatshirt resembles the horizontal cloud pattern in the painting while the stripes on my socks also mimic the the lines and colors of the sky view. We had taken some photos in this abandoned corral area (the first set of photos above) which also helped to represent the horizontal lines in the artwork.

While my outfit incorporated shades of blue and white as well as the general horizontal pattern of the painting, I did not include any of the pinks that appear near the top of the horizon. I figure my pale pink complexion covered that aspect of the painting.

I did get a little stuck with accessorizing this outfit so I stayed with my typical grounding color of black. It really does always work for me because of my dark hair. Even if my outfit does not incorporate any other black pieces, the accessories will always coordinate with my hair.

I have to say that this outfit made me really happy. I was smiling all day with an extra bounce in my step because bright colors and tie dye really do cheer me. And while it may not be the most flattering of outfit combinations, I do not care because it made me smile all day long. If an outfit carries that kind of power, that is exactly what we should be wearing. Don’t you think?

To see more outfits inspired by Georgia O’Keefe’s Sky above Clouds IV, please visit Daenel’s post for the complete roundup of submissions. You can also read the details of Daenel’s own inspired outfit here, Salazar’s here, and Terri’s here. Have you joined the Style Imitating Art challenges yet? Be sure to check for the next prompt on Monday, May 10, 2021.

Keeping it on the edge,

Shelbee

Linking up with these Fabulous Link Parties.

Outfit Details: Sweatshirt-Old Navy / Dress-Thrifted (Soft Surroundings) / Hat-Linda Gibbs Handmade / Necklace and Earrings-Good Life Gift Shop / Socks-Target / Boots-Gift from husband