The piece can be found at the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, USA, and they include some brief detail about it being a depiction of a river zigzagging its way through the canvas. The colours chosen are perhaps the key element to this painting, with an olive green tone against the salmon-pink background working so well together. It feels entirely contemporary, with the use of abstraction to reduce all detail down to just the outlines of these natural features, but despite that we are still able to positively identify just what we are looking at. It helps that we know this artist and recognise how she used nature within much of her work, be it top down views such as this or the more obvious uses of items such as flowers and animal bones. She produced cityscapes whilst living in New York, but those are not what she remains most famous for today.
The artist would use bright colours throughout her career and this was very much a part of the Modernist movement, of which she was once termed the mother. It is a little unfortunate that there is not a wealth of information available on this painting, but it is likely that some exists somewhere, perhaps in some of her historic letters, which frequently reveal key details around the specific paintings that she was working on at the time. What we do know is that this painting is 30 inches tall, by 16 inches wide. It holds the rightful location in the museum dedicated to the artist, but was given to them as a gift by The Burnett Foundation, possibly in 1997. Most museums and galleries survive on donations, both for their collections but also their financing though this institution now holds more than enough of her work to provide a breakthtaking and comprehensive survey of her career to its many thousands of visitors.
This was an artist who took inspiration from nature throughout her career but would bring a new life to it through her own unique artistic style. We would see flowers, for example, in ways that we had never done so before, with oversized features which allowed our eyes to peer into them in a similar way to how photography can enlarge reality. She found photography to be quite an inspiration and many existing photographs have captured her exciting and varied life in different parts of the US. She would have loved the present day's digital opportunities, where so much can be done with an image to create new interpretations, and all so simply, though other changes in society would not have likely pleased her as much.