I've always loved Georgia O'Keefe and was excited to find a book about her life and work that young students can access. I appreciate that instead of recreating O'Keefe's paintings, the illustrator instead "translated the images into cut-paper collages." The book is written in third person, with the opening page reflecting her as perhaps a toddler noticing "light all around." It then traces her life, including her spoken desire to be an artist as a 12-year-old in 1899 -- a "scandal" at the time since only boys could become artists. (Ugh!) But Georgia continues to paint; she gets her inspiration from nature, no matter where she lives. She finds beauty in color, flowers, skies, seashells, and more. The story is an interesting, easily understandable journey through O'Keefe soaking in the world around her and then transferring it to larger-than-life paintings. It's beautifully written and includes a full "More About Georgia O'Keefe" page at the end of the book where readers learn her parents wanted her to be an art teacher, but she "held fast to her dream of earning a living as an artist." Her work is now world renowned and though she has passed, her work continues to grow in museums around the world. This is a great biographical picture book for early and middle elementary students.

The illustrations in this book carry the story. Although it tells the story of Georgia O'Keefe, there is no real spark over who she was, how unusual her paintings were, or how rare it was for a woman during her time, to strike out on her own. ( )

the story of how Georgia expressed her art through her own eyes and all the wonderful paintings/art that she created during her life
6 book

I did not like this book at all. The first reason I disliked this book was for the strange illustrations. The book was about the painter Georgia O’Keeffe and the illustrations throughout the book were drawn to resemble the style that O’Keeffe drew in. Before the book began there was an illustrator’s note in which Julie Paschkis, the woman who illustrated the book, said “I refer to photographs of Georgia O’Keeffe and to painting by her…but I didn’t want to re-create her paintings” and instead created the images using a different painting style than O’Keeffe. I looked up some of Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings and compared them to Paschkis’ and the illustrations in the book were much harder for me to connect to and take what I believe were the emotions Paschkis was trying to convey. For example, on a page that said “the color blue works better for [O’Keeffe]” to portray feelings rather than words, the illustration’s use of blue just looks like a blue dot on the page, but in some of O’Keeffe’s actual paintings, her use of blue casts a somber and even lighthearted emotion on me. Had Paschkis painted her illustrations like O’Keeffe, I believe I would have caught the emotion that was lost in her art style. Another reason I disliked this book is because I would have rather read about the information placed in the “More about Georgia O’Keeffe” section found in the back of the book during the actual text of the book, not at the end after reading the entire book. The section in the back of the book included where and when O’Keeffe was born, the time period in which she was born and the struggles woman artists had at that time, and her lasting impression on the world after her death. These topics would have been better to read about and have illustrations to for me because of the intense emotions connected to these events. Instead, the story talked about instances in which O’Keeffe would go off on her own and find items like the moon, bones, etc. and what she took away from looking at them. Overall, the big idea of this book was to introduce the reader to the life of the artist Georgia O’Keeffe and her art style. ( )

Another great art book for children, very student friendly, put the abstract art form into a way younger minds can appreciate.