Which American state inspired Georgia O'Keeffe's famous bone paintings?

New Mexico inspired Georgia O'Keeffe's famous bone paintings.

O'Keeffe first visited New Mexico in 1917 and returned regularly, eventually spending much of her life there. She collected bleached animal bones from the desert and incorporated them into paintings such as Cow's Skull: Red, White, and Blue and Pelvis with the Distance.

The bones were not simply documentary objects. O'Keeffe enlarged and isolated them, combining their sculptural shapes with vast skies and distant landscapes. She described the New Mexico landscape as a place that had long been meaningful to her.

Arizona, Colorado, and Texas also contain desert and Southwestern environments, but they are not the state most closely identified with O'Keeffe's bone series. New Mexico became central to her personal life and artistic vocabulary.