From the Lake No. 1, Georgia O'Keefe

 I recently went to the the Des Moines Art Center, which I highly recommend, because it has a wonderful collection, and the admission is free, which is even better.
This painting by Georgia O'Keefe is from her time at Lake George in upstate New York.  Long before her four decades in New Mexico, her life included a period in the considerably lusher climes of upstate New York, on Lake George, the glacial Adirondack lake near here where she spent a series of summers — creating scores of paintings — while staying with Alfred Stieglitz, the photographer, art promoter and her eventual husband, whose family kept a small estate there.

She usually came in April and would stay sometimes as late as November or the first snow, whichever came first.   While staying with the Stieglitz family — a large and sometimes boisterous clan — O’Keeffe would hike, row, garden and generally take it all in. “I wish you could see the place here,” she wrote in 1923 to the novelist Sherwood Anderson. “There is something so perfect about the mountains and the lake and the trees. Sometimes I want to tear it all to pieces — it seems so perfect — but it is really lovely.”  It is clear that she was well on her way to abstraction from nature from this time.