Georgia O'Keeffe made her famous New Mexico paintings in New Mexico, a landscape that became central to her mature work. She first visited the state in 1917 and returned nearly every summer from 1929 onward.
O'Keeffe was drawn to the region's high desert, cliffs, adobe buildings, bones, flowers, and intense light. She often isolated individual forms, enlarging them or simplifying them into powerful shapes. Her paintings of the landscape were not intended as literal topographical records; they transformed selected objects and places through color, scale, and composition.
She eventually maintained homes at Ghost Ranch and Abiquiú. The area around Ghost Ranch, north of Santa Fe, supplied subjects including the cliffs known as the Pedernal and Cerro Pedernal. O'Keeffe famously said that the mountain was a private symbol for her.
New Mexico is sometimes treated as merely a late-career setting, but it became a defining artistic environment. O'Keeffe lived there permanently after 1949 and remained closely identified with the state until her death.