We find a dark black tone across the bottom half of the painting, with a blue sky across the top, and then several lines of colour across the centre. We can imagine the landscape that she was looking at when creating this artwork, but very little detail is included, making it impossible to identify the region without using other information from her career. She lived in a variety of places during her lifetime, from busy cities to barren desert-like countryside and this certaintly related to the latter in that regard. She actually chose to move away from city life as her career took off, perhaps uncomfortable with some of the realities of fame, prefering to focus just on her work and not on the attention that came with it.
The 1970s were full of O'Keeffe's exploratory landscape scenes, where she would also take to the air in a series of cloud-based artworks which captured the new rise in public flights. She had always been contemporary, but her level of abstraction was perhaps at its peak by this point, having achieved success and boosted her own confidence from previous successes. Many 20th century artists followed a similar path, where they slowly developed their styles over a number of decades, increasing their level of abstraction each time - see the likes of Miro and Mondrian for two examples of this. O'Keeffe herself was also someone who handled different content at different times, choosing to focus of landscapes at this point, having previously covered animal bones, cityscapes and flowers in great detail.
She, herself, is considered by many to be amongst the most famous female artist of the 20th century, though some would also point to the cult figure of Frida Kahlo as an alternative. Either way, interest in both of their careers was already highly significant even before the current trend of focusing more on female painters arrived. We now see regular exhibitions of work by women from past centuries in major institutions, after many were unfairly ignored previously. Having already achieved academic respect, there is never any danger of anyone suggesting that this new change in society is the result of her fame, as she enjoyed much of it, however unwillingly, within her own lifetime. Paintings such as The Beyond help to remind us of the variety in her career and also how she did not just produce depictions of flowers and animal bones, but actually much more besides.
