Georgia O’Keeffe’s life changed when she made an extended trip to New Mexico in 1929. A country girl who grew up in the farmlands of Wisconsin, she immediately fell in love with New Mexico’s rugged landscape. By the 1930s, O’Keeffe, who lived in New York City, was spending several months at a time by herself in New Mexico. In a letter to a close friend she explained her frequent visits: “You know I never feel at home in the East like I do out here—and finally feeling in the right place again—I feel like myself—and I like it.” By 1949, she had moved to the state permanently. She lived there the rest of her life.

The mountains of New Mexico were among O’Keeffe’s favorite subjects to paint. The flat-topped Cerro Pedernal, a unique mesa near the town of Abiquiu, fascinated her. She referred to it as her mountain and joked, “God told me if I painted that mountain enough, he’d give it to me.” Today, many people still call the Pedernal “O’Keeffe’s Mountain.”

O’Keeffe found inspiration in the smaller details of the terrain as well. Bones, rocks, and pieces of wood became subjects for her artwork. Bones, especially, intrigued her: she saw them as beautiful flowers of the desert and symbols of life. This idea so captivated her that she shipped large barrels of bones to her home in New York so she could continue to paint them even when she wasn’t in New Mexico.

Georgia O’Keeffe liked to paint her subjects from unusual viewpoints and with unconventional proportions. She studied small flowers extremely close up and filled large canvases with the swirling petals of a single blossom. She depicted cityscapes as if she were on the ground looking up, so that the towering skyscrapers seem overwhelming. And she painted massive landforms but showed them far off in the distance, so they appear small.

As with her flower pictures, O’Keeffe painted bones close up and larger than life. In Pedernal—From the Ranch I, we see the mesa through the opening of a pelvic bone. O’Keeffe used the socket of the bone almost like a camera lens, bringing it close to the viewer’s eye. This unusual perspective may reflect the influence of her husband, who was a prominent photographer.

The colors O’Keeffe chose are also surprising. Here, most of the bone is a glowing reddish orange rather than the white we would expect. The mesa, in contrast, is a cool blue. O’Keeffe wasn’t interested in painting colors exactly as they look in nature. She wanted her work to give a sense of the Southwest—of blazing hot sun and clear blue skies.

In 1915, a young Georgia O’Keeffe created a series of abstract charcoal drawings unlike anything she had done before. The drawings had no recognizable subjects; they were purely an exercise of lines, shapes, and shading. They jump-started her professional career (and opened a new chapter in her personal life) when they caught the eye of an important photographer and gallery owner, Alfred Stieglitz.

After those first abstract drawings, O’Keeffe continued to experiment. Inspired by the natural world—flowers, trees, fruits, bones, rocks, the moon—and sometimes by music, she painted abstractions in which circles, ovals, and spirals constantly reappear. These shapes can be seen in swirling rose petals, apples, knots in a piece of wood, or a glowing full moon.

You can also find circular forms in O’Keeffe’s pelvic bone series. In Pedernal—From the Ranch I, the circular opening of the socket focuses our view on her beloved Pedernal Mountain in the distance.