Introduction to Painting: Through O’Keeffe’s Process

Take inspiration from one of the modern masters while learning a variety of essential painting techniques. Drawing from the exhibition Georgia O’Keeffe: “My New Yorks,” this class will learn from O’Keeffe’s process, her approach to abstraction, and her renderings of both human-built and organic subjects.

Learn how to create paintings by planning and transferring compositions, preparing painting surfaces, and determining when a painting feels complete. Participants will experiment with different brushes, bold color combinations, and direct and indirect painting methods as they find their artistic styles.

Working from observation to explore different perspectives, the class will create small studies both indoors and outdoors before developing unique compositions with the guidance of a professional teaching artist.

Week 1: Learn the painting methods that will be explored throughout the class. Study the geometries that surround us while drawing buildings from different perspectives. Make small, monochromatic paintings pared down to essentials.

Week 2: Visit Georgia O’Keeffe: “My New Yorks” and sketch in the galleries. Return to the studio to depict organic forms from observation while continuing to focus on their most essential qualities.

Week 3: Practice color mixing, plan a composition, and begin a larger-format painting that combines methods and subjects explored in previous classes.

Week 4: Complete individual paintings. Then, join your classmates in a final group critique before concluding our time together with a reflection on the techniques and skills we have developed.

Studio Classes enable you to expand your art-making skills through guided, step-by-step instruction with expert teaching artists. Over multiple weeks, you will learn alongside other creative adults and delve deeply into the artistic process, explore new techniques, and build your practice.

This is an introductory-level Studio Class; it is designed to accommodate all levels of skill and talent. If you have never taken a painting class before, this is a great place to start. You will learn new skills that you can carry forward and build on in your artistic practice.

The registration fee includes all materials, weekly access to world-class art on view in the museum’s galleries and special exhibitions, hours of expert instruction, and additional access to a Friday afternoon Open Studio during the run of the class.

In 1924, Georgia O’Keeffe and her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, moved into the Shelton Hotel, then the world’s tallest residential skyscraper. The hotel’s stunning views inspired O’Keeffe to explore midtown Manhattan’s soaring geometries: she experimented across media and scale and with various subjects, forms, and perspectives during an energetic five-year period beginning in 1925. Through these works, which she called “my New Yorks,” she investigated the dynamic potential of the cityscape, often depicting it in dialogue with nature to represent her personal perceptions of the built environment.

This exhibition is the first to critically examine O’Keeffe’s paintings, drawings, and pastels of urban landscapes while situating them in the diverse context of her other compositions of the 1920s and early 1930s. The exhibition establishes these works not as outliers or as anomalous to her practice but rather as entirely integral to her modernist investigation in the 1920s. O’Keeffe’s “New Yorks” are essential to understanding how she became the artist we know today.