Ghost Ranch became a recurring subject and retreat for Georgia O'Keeffe.
O'Keeffe began visiting the Ghost Ranch area in northern New Mexico during the late 1920s. Its dramatic cliffs, broad skies, and vivid geological formations supplied motifs for many paintings and drawings.
She later maintained a house at Ghost Ranch and used the surrounding landscape as a place to work in relative isolation. The area’s red and yellow cliffs appear in paintings such as works based on the Pedernal mountain, which O'Keeffe famously described as a form she could paint because it was “my private mountain.”
Ghost Ranch is not the same place as O'Keeffe’s home in Abiquiú. Both locations were important to her, but Ghost Ranch was especially associated with expansive desert views and the cliffs that recur across her New Mexico imagery.