The name is absent

61

financial circumstances led her to return to the University of Minnesota (where she had
also completed her undergraduate degree).

O’Keeffe did not visit New Mexico until she was in her early forties, but
immediately fell in love with its landscape. By the time she was fifty she had purchased a
house on Ghost Ranch, a little over an hour northwest of Santa Fe. She painted the
landscapes she saw there throughout the rest of her life and, after her husband’s death,
moved there permanently, continuing to paint into her nineties. For O’Keeffe, this was
“real” America, a place where she was able to find renewed inspiration for her art. In
1967 she said: “When I think of death I only regret that I will not be able to see this
beautiful country anymore, unless the Indians are right and my spirit will walk here after
I’m gone.”²²

The natural contrasts of this region seem to appeal to both artists. New Mexico’s
climate presents many of them: hot∕cold, mountain∕desert, wet∕dry, dark∕light.²³ O’Keeffe
uses these contrasts in a series of paintings of New Mexico’s Pedemal Hills, created
during her time at Ghost Ranch. The paintings present views of the hills at different times
of day, in different seasons, from different perspectives, and with different detail, yet the
hills themselves never change. As a composer, the variety of images that a single scene
could produce appealed to Larsen, and when examining the whole collection in the
Viking book, it becomes evident that she chose images for Black Birds, Red Hills based
on both their connection to each other and the contrasts they provided.

²² Barbara Buhler Lynes, Lesley Poling-Kempes, and Frederick W. Turner, Georgia
O’Keeffe, a Sense of Place (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 87.

²³ Ibid., 78.

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