In the mid-1970s, at the age of 88 and nearly blind, Georgia O’Keeffe sketched an untitled charcoal drawing. Faint, smudged black lines rise from the bottom of the frame and converge in a soft spiral at the top. The piece is a variation on the charcoal drawing, “No. 12 Special,” she’d made almost fifty years earlier, in 1915, on the floor of her South Carolina studio. Thirty years-old, alone, and in a new place, “No. 12 Special” had been the first time O’Keeffe allowed herself to break away from her art training and venture into the unknown. That early charcoal drawing ruptured something inside of her — abstract shapes emerging from a raw and fearless state of mind. Several years later, while teaching in rural Texas, she wrote in the margins of a book: “Art is a form of sensation.” This became a guiding principle in her work, especially during the last ten years of her life, when she was losing her eyesight. The sensation could be a fading memory, an emotional state, or the longing for a particular landscape. Motifs that resurfaced in the watercolor and charcoal sketches of the 1970s — spirals, spheres, curvilinear patterns — came from a perpetual state of yearning: shapes that were familiar to O’Keeffe, that upon making them allowed her to dive into the unknown once again. 

O’Keeffe was born into the small farming community of Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, in 1887, and went on to study at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Columbia Teacher’s College in New York City. The teachings of Arthur Wesley Dow resonated with her. Through “the arrangement of color, line, and shape,” art could be abstract and personal as opposed to purely representational. While living in New York, O’Keeffe met her future husband, Alfred Stieglitz, and a lifelong friend, Anita Politzer, who would both become instrumental in catapulting her artistic career. In 1915, she took an art teaching job in Columbia, South Carolina. It was there, over a roughly two year time period, that O’Keeffe made the original charcoal drawings, which she named, “The Specials.” In 1916, O’Keeffe moved to the Texas Panhandle to head the art department at West Texas Normal College. “It is absurd the way I love this country,” she wrote to Stieglitz in a letter. The big, mercurial sky and the endless plains captivated her. “It makes me want to breathe so deep that I’ll break,” she wrote. This was the beginning of her lifelong attachment to the Southwest, a place she eventually made her permanent home, when she moved to Abiquiu, New Mexico, decades later.

Shortly after making “The Specials,” O’Keeffe began to experiment with her own motifs, ones she’d discovered within herself. The two years she spent in Columbia were emotionally charged, between teaching, navigating a long-distance romance, grappling with the news of her mother’s and sister’s illnesses, and living alone in a place she found to be “highly mediocre.” Turning to nature for respite, she was influenced by the pattern of leaves, the silhouette of the surrounding Blue Ridge mountains, and the shapes of local flora. Topography and natural objects provided her with the forms in which to fill and process this spectrum of feeling. “I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me — shapes and ideas so near to me — so natural to my way of being and thinking,” she wrote to Politzer. Spirals, rising like big waves, dominated some sketches, while small spheres nestled among parallel lines appeared in others. “Special No. 9,” with its rising clouds and rain drops, was what O’Keeffe called “the drawing of a headache.” These abstract shapes depict a tumultuous arc of frustration, love, grief, and longing. In “Special No. 8,” the spiral takes up most of the frame, as if it is about to envelop the paper itself. After the death of her sister and mother in 1916, O’Keeffe revisited the fiddlehead fern-like shape of “Special No. 12” in watercolor. The inward spiral was a symbol of self-reflection and the addition of color was a way to track the changing nature of grief itself. Incorporating color as a way to sift through certain emotional states continued throughout her career. In the final years of her life, when her eyesight was nearly gone, the last watercolors she produced included motifs from some of these earliest abstractions. “Abstraction Pink Waves and Circles” was similar to “No. 12 Special”: the ascending spiral appeared again, in thick red brush strokes, like a fire burning out.

While living in South Carolina, O’Keeffe worked almost exclusively in charcoal, and she made another group of drawings featuring elegant, curvilinear shapes. Rounded, soft lines converge before dancing off the page in “Drawing XIII.” This meandering pattern resurfaced in drawings and sketches from the late 1950s and early 1960s, after months spent traveling through Japan, India, and Peru. Aerial views from the airplane window lingered in O’Keeffe’s mind and, upon returning home, she painted the landscapes as she remembered them. Continuous mountains, canyons, and streams sweep across the page in mellifluous black lines. Shortly after this series, she painted the roads and ridges surrounding her Abiquiu, New Mexico, property, in “Winter Road I” and “Drawing II.” Both of these works are strikingly similar in tone and compositional structure to “Abstraction IX” from 1916 and the aerial sketches. The curvilinear motif was a way of re-tracing paths and trails, foreign and familiar. The lines, which begin like thick black ink at the bottom of the page, thin out as they swim into oblivion at the top. As O’Keeffe began to lose her eyesight in the l960s, the free-flowing black lines were a way to map the landscapes within her. 

When O’Keeffe moved to Canyon, Texas, in 1917, to teach at West Texas Normal College, she painted some of the “Special” motifs in watercolor. Sunrises and sunsets, like “Light Coming on the Plains No. II” and “Sunrise 16” were fuller, vibrant expressions of their charcoal variations. The ovoid of “No. 8 Special” reappears as the sun, bleeding into the plains and blurring the horizon line. In the final watercolors O’Keeffe made in the late 1970s — all of which she left untitled — she was still experimenting with the original spherical shapes of the “Specials.” In one, she rests a red sphere between two dark green vertical lines. She was recalling not only the feeling of the vastness of the plains, but the sense of belonging she felt upon seeing them for the first time. “It felt like home,” she had said shortly after arriving. That year marked a time in O’Keeffe’s life when she was fiercely independent, managing her own art department and hiking alone into nearby Palo Duro Canyon. In these final watercolors at the end of her life, a red sun is sepulchered among pillars of green, signifying a sense of contentment and home.

There were other motifs in O’Keeffe’s oeuvre, like skulls, flowers, and shells, and their arrivals function almost like chapters in her life. Flowers appeared during happier times. Animal bones came after she separated herself from Stieglitz and began living alone at Ghost Ranch, in Abiquiu. Biomorphic forms from her early charcoal drawings reappear throughout her extensive body of work, like in the hollows of the Palo Duro Canyon sketches or the oblong outlines of the Abiquiu door paintings. And yet, it’s the final watercolors, stark and pure, that are in direct conversation with this early work, as if the spiral wave from “Special No. 12,” once drawn, never actually stopped moving, but kept propelling her forward. A lifetime of chasing a sensation.