The New Mexico mountain Georgia O'Keeffe painted repeatedly was Cerro Pedernal.
Cerro Pedernal is a flat-topped volcanic mesa in northern New Mexico. O'Keeffe could see it from areas around Abiquiu and made it a recurring subject, reducing its distinctive silhouette into compositions of layered color and simplified shape.
The mountain became more than a recognizable landmark in her art. O'Keeffe’s repeated treatment of it shows how she returned to a single landscape form, testing different viewpoints, seasons, and degrees of abstraction. Her work helped make the mesa especially associated with her New Mexico period.
Cerro Pedernal is sometimes confused with Mount Taylor or with the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, both also prominent New Mexico landmarks. The name is Spanish for “flint hill,” and the mesa stands in the Jemez Mountains region. O'Keeffe later joked that she had painted it so often that she could no longer see it without thinking of her own paintings.