Light Coming on the Plains

Striving to design harmonious paintings that were an interpretation of her feelings about the subject, she created works of the Texas plains and wide open skies—and particularly the sunrises found there—that were wondrous to her.

They have been called radical works of art, and Light Coming on the Plains III is considered one of the best paintings of the skies by Laura Cumming of The Guardian.

[7] Building upon a practice she began in South Carolina in her charcoal abstractions, O'Keeffe painted to express her most private sensations and feelings.

Rather than the depiction a brilliant sunrise, Light Coming on the Plains is evocative of the sun rising in the sky through ever deepening color washes of indigo blue.

[8] In the series, she reflects her ability to design with minimal form and to create harmony using tonal values, or Notan-composition, that she learned through Alon Bemet and Arthur Wesley Dow.

[2] She later compared it to O'Keeffe's signature motifs of erotic flowers and desert skulls, calling Light Coming on the Plains III "one of the purest and most radical images O’Keeffe ever made".

About the motivation and development of the work, Cumming states, "Daybreak over Texas, and Georgia O’Keeffe is out in the landscape, mesmerised by the vast skies above her.