Gifts from Georgia's Garden
How Georgia O'Keeffe Nourished Her Art
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Come behind the scenes of Georgia O’Keeffe’s famous flower paintings to her sustainable homestead in New Mexico, where art was everything and everything was art.
Most of us have heard the name Georgia O’Keeffe— she’s one of the most famous women in art history. But did you know that for most of her life, she lived on her own land in New Mexico, grew her own food, bought locally, and even made her own clothing?
Georgia’s garden and her art fed and enriched one another, just as her bean plants enriched the soil and her home-grown feasts fed her friends. In spite of the era’s prejudice against female artists, Georgia lived and thrived in her verdant sanctuary well into old age.
Soothing and inspiring, Gifts from Georgia’s Garden illuminates the life and philosophy of a figure every child should know. Backmatter adds context to O’Keeffe’s story and invites families to try out her sustainable gardening techniques— and her pecan butterball cookies.
Gifts for Georgia’s Garden is the latest in Lisa Robinson’s collection of thoughtful, artfully-told picture book biographies on figures who broke the mold and made history because of it. Hadley Hooper, a painter in her own right and the illustrator of books about Matisse (The Iridescence of Birds) and Giacometti (Two Brothers, Four Hands), perfectly evokes Georgia O’Keeffe’s style with pictures that burst with color and life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Tired of New York City's "cars, crowds, and skyscrapers," Georgia O'Keeffe (1887–1986), who'd been painting large, lush flowers, escapes to the "canyons, mesas, and skyscapes" of New Mexico. There, she gets in touch with both the land and her younger self—the Wisconsin farm girl determined to be an artist. O'Keeffe cultivates a garden and paints to the rhythms of nature as well as welcomes friends to simple, bountiful meals. "The art of caretaking—of her home and her garden—nourished O'Keeffe's art-making," Robinson writes. Hooper's illustrations range from the realistic to the impressionistic; one vignette shows an elaborately layered bouquet of blooms emerging from O'Keeffe's head, while another illuminates a long outdoor table laden with home-cooked foods. It's an uncomplicated portrait that highlights how the intersection of environment and creative freedom formed an artist for whom "everything was art, and art was everything." An afterword includes the subject's recipe for pecan butterballs. Ages 4–8.
