"White Birch" by Georgia O'Keeffe

Me in front of Amon Carter Museum

"White Birch"

Oil Painting by Georgia O'Keeffe
Vicki Galati

"White Birch", an oil on canvas painting completed by Georgia O’Keeffe in 1925 is an abstract rendering of a white birch tree found on the Alfred Stieglitz family estate in upstate New York. The artist was quoted as saying "A little way from the dock there was a big old birch tree with many trunks. To see the tree at its best I was up early and out in a rowboat under the trees as the sun came up over the mountains across the lake. The trunks were whitest in the early sunrise – the foliage a golden yellow with a few leaves standing out sharply here and there."
The trunks of the tree create a vertical line up the center of the painting and then branch left and right while curving around each other. The four main trunks are thick and long with smaller limbs branching off at the top of the painting.
The bright yellows used for the foliage not only represent the bright yellow hues of birch leaves in the fall but also gives one the impression of the brightness of the sun shining through the branches and foliage of the tree. The darker gold and umber colors within the foliage lend depth and give one an idea of the thickness of the foliage. The heavier texture of the strokes used on the darker gold and tans and the spacing for use of those colors gives one the perspective of sitting under the tree looking up or looking through the spaces between the trunks.
The brightness of the white of the trunks also gives one an idea of the brightness of the early morning sun. The smoothness and softness of the shades of tan accentuate the graceful sweep of the trunks of the tree.
The symmetrical balance of the painting is created by the trunks moving vertically up the center of the piece with gold, yellows and umbers on either side used for foliage. The eye of the viewer is initially drawn to the four trunks in the lower center of the painting. Two areas (one on each side of the twisting trunks) of leaves painted with sharper edges and specifically identifiable in an otherwise abstract view of foliage are secondary focal points on either side of the center of the painting. The final point of emphasis is found in the top center of the painting where darker colors and the addition of several smaller branches pointed in several directions give one the impression of additional size and thickness of foliage outside one’s view of the painting.
Ms. O’Keeffe, as is usual within many of her paintings, utilizes the entire canvas to emphasis the size of the tree. Usually Ms. O’Keeffe’s paintings are magnifications of the subject painted. In the case of "White Birch" however, the utilization of the entire canvas is to emphasize that the painting only reflects a small portion of a very large tree and that as one stands or sits under the tree looking up, one is dwarfed by the size of the tree.
"White Birch" is an abstract view of a birch tree as seen by someone standing under the great tree early in the morning of a crisp fall day. The unusual clarity of some of the foliage within the branches of the tree is a somewhat shocking sharpness in an otherwise soft and graceful perspective of the majestic tree. The use of bright yellow hues and softer darker hues of gold and umber identifies the time as sunrise and leaves one with the feeling of a warm but crisp and bright morning.