Aziz Art June 2016

In 1908, she won the League's
William Merritt Chase still-life
prize for her oil painting Dead
Rabbit with Copper Pot.Her prize
was a scholarship to attend the
League's outdoor
summer school in Lake George,
New York. While in the city
in 1908, O'Keeffe attended an
exhibition of Rodin's
watercolors at the gallery 291,
owned by her future husband,
photographer Alfred Stieglitz.
O'Keeffe abandoned the idea of
pursuing a career as an artist
in late 1908, claiming that she
could never distinguish herself as
an artist within the mimetic
tradition which had formed the
basis of her art training.She took a
job in Chicago as a commercial
artist. She did not paint for four
years,and said that the smell of
turpentine made her sick.
She was inspired to paint again in
1912, when she attended a
class at the University of Virginia
Summer School, where she was
introduced to the innovative ideas
of Arthur Wesley Dow by Alon
Bement. Dow encouraged artists to
express themselves using line,
color, and shading harmoniously.
From 1912-14, she taught art in the
public schools in Amarillo in the
Texas Panhandle.She attended
Teachers College of Columbia
University from 1914–15, where
she took classes from Dow, who
greatly influenced O'Keeffe's
thinking about the process of
making art.She served as a teaching
assistant to Bement during the
summers from 1913–16 and taught
at Columbia College, Columbia,
South Carolina in late 1915, where
she completed a series of highly
innovative charcoal abstractions.
After further course work at
Columbia in early 1916 and
summer teaching for Bement, she
took a job as head of the art
department at West Texas State
Normal College from late 1916 to
February 1918, the fledgling West
Texas A&M University in Canyon
just south of Amarillo. While there,
she often visited the Palo Duro
Canyon, making its forms a subject
in her work.