Georgia O'Keeffe made a set of paintings of Palo Duro Canyon while working as a department head and art instructor at West Texas State Normal College.
Carolyn Kastner, curator of "Georgia O'Keeffe’s Far Wide Texas", states that "she was at the peak of her commitment to abstraction" at that time.
There are also multicolored layers of white gypsum, bright red claystone, and lavender, gray, yellow ochre mudstone.
[4] Inspired by the principles of Arthur Wesley Dow and the Texas landscape, O'Keeffe made paintings using vibrant red, blue and yellow colors.
[5] About 1916, she used brilliant red and yellow colors in Special #21: Palo Duro Canyon, which belongs to the New Mexico Museum of Art.