Cerro Pedernal appears repeatedly in Georgia O'Keeffe's paintings as a distinctive New Mexico mountain form.
Cerro Pedernal is a flat-topped mesa in northern New Mexico. O'Keeffe could see it from her Ghost Ranch area and made it a recurring subject, depicting the isolated form in different seasons, colors, and degrees of abstraction.
She once wrote that it was her private mountain and that she painted it frequently because it was always visible from her surroundings. The mesa became one of the clearest geographical signatures in her work.
Cerro Pedernal is sometimes mistaken for larger New Mexico landmarks such as Shiprock or the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Unlike those subjects, it is a relatively isolated, flat-topped mesa strongly identified with O'Keeffe's personal landscape. Its repeated appearances show how she transformed a specific place into a visual symbol.