Art Beyond Sight: Handbook

Summer Days

Georgia O'Keefe

Summer Days is a painting by the artist Georgia O'Keefe. She painted it in 1936. It's an oil painting on canvas. The dimensions are inches high by inches wide. Or centimeters high by centimeters wide. These dimensions mean it is a rectangle that hangs vertically. It is in the collection of The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Summer Days contains only a few elements. The bleached white skull of a deer with antlers dominates the top two thirds of the painting. The long snout of the deer is pointing downward, as if you are looking down at the top of the skull. The antlers create elaborate curved patterns on both sides of the skull.

The skull appears to be floating in the sky. Below the skull are a few desert wildflowers, red and yellow. The flowers also appear to be floating in the sky, not growing out of the ground. And below the flowers are low rolling hills of the desert. The hills are brown. They extend across the entire bottom of the painting from one edge to the other. The sky just above the hills shows patches of blue and white. But the sky in the rest of the painting is entirely white.

Critics described Summer Days as both extraordinarily beautiful and surreal. Yet O'Keefe was painting real things in her life. The skull and antlers, the flowers, the desert hills...all reflect the reality of O'Keefe's life in New Mexico . She began visiting the American southwest in 1929 and fell in love with it. Eventually she moved to New Mexico and lived there until her death. But even before moving there, on her visits she began collecting the bleached white animal skulls scattered over the desert. She used the skulls in a number of her paintings.

For some viewers, the skulls are slightly menacing, suggesting death, or possibly the destruction of the American landscape. Yet you can also see the skulls as celebrating the wildlife that first lived in the landscape, presenting both their beauty and spirituality.

The skull in Summer Days is a definite reminder of mortality, but it's not a morbid image. Life and death are connected. Summer Days is a visually poetic reminder of that as O'Keefe combines the dried and bleached look of the skull with the colorful beauty of the flowers in the timeless space of the desert.