Cerro Pedernal was the New Mexico mountain Georgia O'Keeffe painted repeatedly after first seeing it from a distance. The flat-topped mountain rises above the surrounding landscape and became one of her most recognizable recurring subjects. O'Keeffe wrote that it was her private mountain and that she could never finish painting it.
Pedernal lies in northern New Mexico, near Abiquiu. Its distinctive profile made it especially suitable for O'Keeffe's process of reducing a landscape to a clear, powerful form. She painted it from different viewpoints and in different colors, treating the mountain as both a physical place and a compositional idea.
Cerro Pedernal is not the same subject as the Ghost Ranch cliffs, the Chama River, or the Taos-area landscapes associated with other artists. O'Keeffe's images of Pedernal also vary greatly, so there is no single color scheme that identifies every version. The mountain's recurring appearance reflects her long relationship with northern New Mexico.