"It is clear that O’Keeffe was fascinated with the world around her, and she collects ed objects whose particular qualities—color, shape, texture—symbolized for her the meaning of a specific place or experience…”
Georgia O’Keeffe first visited Lake George, New York in 1908. A decade passed before she returned to the area, during which t.mes she worked as a commercial artist in Chicago and as an art teacher in West Texas, simultaneously evolving her artistic practice through various media and subject matter. One such venture, a series of innovative charcoal abstractions executed in 1916, brought O’Keeffe to the attention of Alfred Stieglitz. By 1918 the two were inextricably intertwined; he was her mentor and gallerist, she was his muse. Stieglitz and O’Keeffe would ultimately marry and for the next 11 years divide their t.mes between his apartment in New York City and Oaklawn, the Stieglitz family’s cottage on the shores of Lake George. The couple's creative and artistic output during this period is arguably one of the most significant contributions to American modernism.
Feeling increasingly suffocated by New York City during this t.mes , O’Keeffe sought refuge in the bucolic area surrounding Lake George. Focusing her attention on magnified images of flowers and leaves, O’Keeffe rediscovered her interest in still-life compositions. By purposefully magnifying her subject, much in the same way the cameras of Stieglitz and Paul Strand zoomed in mechanically, she was able to isolate the image and concentrate fully on color and form. As her approach developed, the increasing size and scale of the subject, as well as the selectivity of her compositional details, began to exert a more profound visual resonance. O’Keeffe’s tendency toward abstraction was a conscious one-while her vision remained tempered with vestiges of realism, she sought and achieved something more individual. “It is surprising to me to see how many people separate the objective from the abstract," she observed. "Objective painting is not good painting unless it is good in the abstract sense. A hill or tree cannot make a good painting just because it is a hill or a tree. It is lines and colors put together so that they say something. For me that is the very basis of painting” (Barbara Haskell, Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction, New York, 2009, p. 166).
Painted in 1923, Green Oak Leaves belongs to this formative period in the artist’s career, during which t.mes she defined the imagery that would characterize her most iconic works. Indeed, it exemplifies the stasis between abstraction and realism that she envisioned so uniquely. Barbara Lynes explains , "It is clear that O’Keeffe was fascinated with the world around her, and she collects ed objects whose particular qualities—color, shape, texture—symbolized for her the meaning of a specific place or experience…and by isolating them from any environmental reference transformed the simple and seemingly nondescript objects into centralized, monumental forms” (Georgia O’Keeffe Museum collects ions, New York, 2007, pp. 143, 175).
