Georgia O'Keeffe famously painted animal bones, especially bleached bones she found in the New Mexico desert. These objects became major subjects in her work from the 1930s onward.
Her bone paintings include works such as Ram's Head, White Hollyhock-Hills and Cow's Skull: Red, White, and Blue. She placed bones against open skies or stark backgrounds, emphasizing their shapes, surfaces, and symbolic associations.
O'Keeffe explained that she liked the bones because they were more striking than flowers and seemed to belong to the landscape. The paintings are not simply anatomical studies; they combine close observation with abstraction, scale changes, and carefully controlled color.
The bones are sometimes confused with her flower paintings because both subjects were enlarged and isolated. In each case, O'Keeffe transformed a familiar natural object into a powerful composition, but the desert-bone series is specifically associated with the American Southwest.