the barn

Most people picture Georgia O'Keeffe as the artist of oversized flowers and pale desert skulls, so this hushed farm scene from 1932 comes as a surprise. She painted it during her time at Lake George in upstate New York, where she lived with her husband, the photographer Alfred Stieglitz. A large dark barn takes up most of the canvas, its nearly black walls broken only by a handful of small windows that catch a soft, pale glow. Behind it sits a smaller red building, and above it all hangs a flat, heavy gray sky. Nothing is showy or busy, just plain shapes and a still, slightly lonely feeling.

The real charm of this painting is how O'Keeffe pares things down to their simplest forms. The barn reads almost like a solid block of shadow, and the muted greens and grays in the field give the whole scene a cool, damp mood, like an early morning that has not yet decided whether to brighten or rain. O'Keeffe loved these old farm buildings and once called the barns at Lake George a motif she came back to over and over. This quiet work is a nice reminder that she could find something worth painting in the ordinary corners of a farmyard, not only in blossoms and bones.