Description of the Painting
Music, Pink, and Blue is an oil on canvas painting created in 1918 during O’Keeffe’s early exploration of the abstract form of painting. The painting features a lot of bright colors on a blue background. The colors are carefully and meticulously used across the painting to create a beautiful contrast. It features hues of bright blue, green, vermillion, and purple. The different colors transition into one another to create a dynamic and vibrant composition. This is reminiscent of the abstract style of art. The painting is created on a 35 by 29-inch canvas. Georgia used the colors and patterns in the paint to try and visualize music. This painting is currently located at the Whitney Museum of American Art in the United States.
Inspiration and meaning
Georgia's love for music inspires music, Pink, and Blue. In an interview, she confessed that music made her feel some thrill that she couldn’t explain with words. For this reason, she had a desire to turn music into something visible to the eye. Georgia was passionate about expressing thoughts and feelings through paints and brushes. A lot of people believed that music did not require words to be felt or understood. Georgia believed that she could turn use art to represent music, hence creating Music, Pink and Blue. This is a spirit that she would carry throughout the rest of her career. She tried to show the world the beauty of the most natural things like flowers through her paintings.
Georgia also used her abstract paintings as a individual expression of intangible items. She also used the paintings to showcase her emotional state and esthetic about the ordinary world and her surroundings. However, her critics suggested that her works were a psychological expression of her sexuality. The misreading of her works is one of the main reasons she transitioned from abstract painting to modern art.
Similar works
In addition to this piece, Georgia went on to create several other paintings trying to visualize music. She created Music Pink and Blue II, which was also developed in 1919. She also created Blue and Green Music, a painting through which she tried to create a visual symphony guided by color descriptions of musical instruments. These paintings helped O’Keeffe acquired acknowledgement in the abstract expressionist era.
