For seven decades, Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986) was a major figure in American art. Remarkably, she remained independent from shifting art trends and her work stayed true to her own vision, which was based on finding the essential, abstract forms in nature. With exceptionally keen powers of observation and great finesse with a paintbrush, she recorded subtle nuances of colour, shape, and light that enlivened her paintings and attracted a wide audience.

乔治娅·欧基夫(1887-是美国艺术界的重要人物。她令人惊讶的始终保持着独立的艺术风格没有受制于不断变化的艺术潮流，她的作品始终忠于她自己的艺术视野，着眼于发现大自然中本质的、抽象的形态。凭借着极为敏锐的观察力和娴熟的画笔技巧，她记录下了色彩、形状和光线的微妙变化，使她的画作充满生命力，并吸引了广泛的观众。

Born in 1887 near Sun Prairie, Wisconsin to cattle breeders Francis and Ida O'Keeffe, Georgia was raised on their farm along with her six siblings. By the time she graduated from high school in 1905, she had determined to make her way as an artist. She studied the techniques of traditional painting at the Art Institute of Chicago school (1905) and the Art Students League of New York (1907-8). After attending university and then training college, she became an art teacher and taught in elementary schools, high schools, and colleges in Virginia, Texas, and South Carolina from 1911 to 1918.

欧基夫于1887年出生在威斯康星州阳光草原附近，父母弗朗西斯和艾达·欧基夫是养牛人，她和六个兄弟姐妹一起在农场长大。1905年高中毕业时，她决定以艺术家身份走自己的路。她曾在芝加哥艺术学院(1905年)和纽约艺术学生联盟(1907-1908年)学习传统绘画技巧。完成大学学业后，她成为一名艺术教师，1911年至1918年间在弗吉尼亚州、德克萨斯州和南卡罗来纳州的小学、高中和大学教授艺术。

During this period, O'Keeffe began to experiment with creating abstract compositions in charcoal, and produced a series of innovative drawings that led her art in a new direction. She sent some of these drawings to a friend in New York, who showed them to art collector and photographer Alfred Stieglitz in January 1916. Stieglitz was impressed, and exhibited the drawings later that year at his gallery on Fifth Avenue, New York City, where the works of many avant-garde artists and photographers were introduced to the American public.

在这段时间里，欧基夫开始尝试用炭笔创作抽象作品，并创作了一系列创新的素描，这些作品使她的艺术朝着新的方向发展。她将一些作品寄给了在纽约的朋友，朋友将这些画作展示给了艺术收藏家和摄影师阿尔弗雷德·斯蒂格利茨。斯蒂格利茨十分欣赏这些作品，并于1916年1月在他的画廊举办了画展，向美国公众介绍了许多先锋艺术家的作品。

With Stieglitz's encouragement and promise of financial support, O'Keeffe arrived in New York in June 1918 to begin a career as an artist. For the next three decades, Stieglitz vigorously promoted her work in twenty-two solo exhibitions and numerous group installations. The two were married in 1924. The ups and downs of their personal and professional relationship were recorded in Stieglitz's celebrated black-and-white portraits of O'Keeffe, taken over the course of twenty years (1917-37).

在斯蒂格利茨的鼓励和承诺提供财务支持下，欧基夫于1918年6月前往纽约，开始了她的艺术生涯。在接下来的三十年里，斯蒂格利茨通过举办22次个人画展和多次群展，积极推广她的作品。1924年，两人结婚。他们个人与职业关系中的高潮与低谷，通过斯蒂格利茨拍摄的欧基夫的黑白肖像得以记录，这些肖像拍摄持续了20年(1917-1937年)。

By the mid-1920s, O'Keeffe was recognized as one of America's most important and successful artists, widely known for the architectural pictures that dramatically depict the soaring skyscrapers of New York. But most often, she painted botanical subjects, inspired by annual trips to the Stieglitz family summer home. In her magnified images depicting flowers, begun in 1924, O'Keeffe brings the viewer right into the picture.

到1920年代中期，欧基夫已经被公认为美国最重要且最成功的艺术家之一，她因创作出戏剧性描绘纽约高楼大厦的建筑画而广为人知。然而，她最常绘制的仍然是植物题材，这些作品受到她每年访问斯蒂格利茨家族夏季度假胜地的启发。从1924年开始，在她非凡的描绘花朵的画作中，她把观众直接代入进了作品。

Enlarging the tiniest details to fill an entire metre-wide canvas emphasized their shapes and lines and made them appear abstract. Such daring compositions helped establish O'Keeffe's reputation as an innovative modernist.

她放大了花朵的细节，使之充满整幅画布，强调了花卉的形态和线条，使其呈现出抽象的效果。这样的大胆构图帮助欧基夫建立了她作为创新的现代派的声誉。

In 1929, O'Keeffe made her first extended trip to the state of New Mexico. It was a visit that had a lasting impact on her life, and an immediate effect on her work. Over the next two decades she made almost annual trips to New Mexico, staying up to six months there, painting in relative solitude, then returning to New York each winter to exhibit the new work at Stieglitz's gallery. This pattern continued until she moved permanently to New Mexico in 1949.

1929年，欧基夫首次长时间访问新墨西哥州，这次访问对她的生活产生了深远的影响，并立即改变了她的创作方向。在接下来的二十年里，她几乎每年都去新墨西哥州，通常停留长达六个月，在相对孤独的环境中作画，之后每年冬天返回纽约，在斯蒂格利茨的画廊展示新作。直到1949年，她才决定永久定居新墨西哥州。

There, O'Keeffe found new inspiration: at first, it was the numerous sun-bleached bones she came across in the state's rugged terrain that sparked her imagination. Two of her earliest and most celebrated Southwestern paintings exquisitely reproduce a cow skull's weathered surfaces, jagged edges, and irregular openings. Later, she also explored another variation on this theme in her large series of Pelvis pictures, which focused on the contrasts between convex and concave surfaces, and solid and open spaces. However, it was the region's spectacular landscape, with its unusual geological formations, vivid colours, clarity of light, and exotic vegetation, that held the artist's imagination for more than four decades. Often, she painted the rocks, cliffs, and mountains in striking close-up, just as she had done with her botanical subjects.

在新墨西哥州，欧基夫找到了新的创作灵感:最初，是州内崎岖地形中散落的日晒牛骨激发了她的想象力。她的两幅最早且最具代表性的西南题材画作精美地再现了牛头骨风化的表面、锋利的边缘和不规则的开口。后来，她又在大规模的骨盆系列作品中探索这一主题的另一种变体，集中表现了凸面与凹面、实心与开口空间之间的对比。然而，令她着迷的是新墨西哥州壮丽的自然景观，那里独特的地质结构、鲜艳的色彩、明亮的光线以及异国情调的植被，吸引了她的艺术创造长达四十多年。她常常近距离描绘岩石、悬崖和山脉，就像她以往描绘植物的方式一样。

O'Keeffe eventually owned two homes in New Mexico – the first, her summer retreat at Ghost Ranch, was nestled beneath 200-metre cliffs, while the second, used as her winter residence, was in the small town of Abiquiú. While both locales provided a wealth of imagery for her paintings, one feature of the Abiquiú house – the large walled patio with its black door – was particularly inspirational. In more than thirty pictures between 1946 and 1960, she reinvented the patio into an abstract arrangement of geometric shapes.

欧基夫最终在新墨西哥州拥有了两处房产:第一处是位于幽灵牧场的夏季度假屋，坐落在200米高的悬崖下;第二处是她的冬季住所，位于阿比基乌小镇。虽然这两处住所都为她的创作提供了丰富的灵感，但阿比基乌住所中的一处特色--一座带黑色大门的大型围墙庭院--尤其激发了她的创作灵感。在1946至1960年间，她创作了三十多幅作品，将庭院转化为一种抽象的几何形态组合。

From the 1950s into the 1970s, O'Keeffe travelled widely, making trips to Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. Flying in planes inspired her last two major series – aerial views of rivers and expansive paintings of the sky viewed from just above clouds. In both series, O'Keeffe increased the size of her canvases, sometimes to mural proportions, reflecting perhaps her newly expanded view of the world. When in 1965 she successfully translated one of her cloud motifs to a monumental canvas measuring 6 metres in length (with the help of assistants), it was an enormous challenge and a special feat for an artist nearing eighty years of age.

从1950年代到1970年代，欧基夫广泛旅行，曾访问亚洲、中东和欧洲。飞行的经历启发了她最后两大系列的创作---是描绘河流的鸟瞰图，二是从云层上方俯视的广阔天空画作。在这两大系列中，欧基夫增加了画布的尺寸，有时甚至达到壁画的比例，反映了她可能扩展了的全球视野。1965年，当她成功地将其中一个云的主题转化为长达6米的大型画布时，这对一位接近八十岁的艺术家来说，是一项巨大的挑战与特别的成就。

The last two decades of the artist's life were relatively unproductive as ill health and blindness hindered her ability to work. O'Keeffe died in 1986 at the age of ninety-eight, but her rich legacy of some 900 paintings has continued to attract subsequent generations of artists and art lovers who derive inspiration from these very American images.

欧基夫生命的最后二十年相对不太富有生产力因为她的健康状况和视力障碍影响了她的创作。1986年，欧基夫去世，享年九十八岁，但她留下的约900幅画作仍继续吸引着后来的艺术家和艺术爱好者，他们从这些具有浓郁美国特色的作品中汲取灵感。