Evening Star 6

Painted in 1917, this watercolor comes from a time when Georgia O'Keeffe was teaching in the wide open plains of Texas. She loved walking out into the evening to watch the sky, and the bright planet Venus, often called the evening star, caught her eye again and again. This piece is one in a whole series she made trying to capture that single glowing point of light hanging over the flat land at dusk. Here you can see the sun or star burning yellow at the center, wrapped in a swirl of fiery red, with a deep blue band stretching across the bottom like the horizon line.

What stands out is how loose and free the painting feels. O'Keeffe wasn't trying to copy exactly what she saw. Instead she let the colors bleed and spread on wet paper, holding onto the feeling of that sky rather than its details. These early watercolors were quite bold for their day, and they hint at the simple, powerful shapes she would become famous for later with her giant flowers and desert scenes. It is a small and quiet work, but it shows an artist learning to trust her own way of seeing the world.