Georgia O'Keeffe repeatedly painted Cerro Pedernal after seeing it from her New Mexico homes.
Cerro Pedernal is a flat-topped volcanic mesa in northern New Mexico. Its distinctive profile made it immediately recognizable in the landscape around Abiquiú and Ghost Ranch, where O'Keeffe spent much of her later career.
O'Keeffe used the mountain as a recurring motif rather than producing one single definitive view. She simplified its shape and placed it within spare compositions that emphasized distance, color, and the geometry of the horizon.
She once famously said that Cerro Pedernal was her private mountain and that she could paint it from memory. That statement is often repeated as a summary of her attachment to the site, but the mountain remained a real geographic landmark in New Mexico.