The light seems to emanate from the right-hand side, illuminating the tops of these hills from an angle. In addition, the gullies created by water erosion are visible right to the farthest hill. This works to give the image a more realistic look. On the other hand, the reddish hue shows that the hills were made from volcanic activity sometimes in the past. The Peach and yellow hues in the background indicate that the weather is dry, hot, and sunny. This is a painting of a local landscape possible in New Mexico. While she had not moved into the area (she bought a ranch in 1940), she had had a great interest in the landscape of the area and would later create an image that shows the mountain at the horizon of her ranch. She must have painted the picture during summer when most of the green was dry, and the hills had the reddish earthy colour.
Georgia O'Keeffe used the Precisionism style to create this painting. Precisionism was coined around 1920 and had its roots in futurism, cubism and Orphism and primarily practised in the United States. Other artists that used this style included Charles Sheeler, Charles Demuth and Niles Spencer. Unlike other types of art, Precisionism was so much interested in showing the exact features of the objects or landscape in question. It did not exaggerate certain aspects or introduce elements that could not be observed with naked eyes in the natural world. Therefore, by going with this style, Georgia gave a pretty good image of the hills in question.
The genre of the painting is the landscape. This is the depiction of natural scenery. At the time when photography was still in its infancy, artists showed natural features of their community using landscape paintings. This genre worked well with the precisionist movement at the time. This is because painters could create a replica of the landscape that they were looking at art in the way their eyes could see without exaggerating any features, whether human-made or natural. This painting is a perfect depiction of the near dessert environment that Georgia O'Keeffe had known.
