Verbal Description: Georgia O'Keeffe, Music, Pink and Blue No. 2

Georgia O’Keeffe’s Music, Pink and Blue No. 2 (1918) is an oil painting on canvas. It measures 35 inches in height and 29 15/16 inches in width. It measures 88.9 centimeters in height and 76 centimeters in width.

This is an abstract painting. The colors are pale and light with an emphasis on pinks and blues. Emerging from the bottom of the painting, near the right corner, vertically slanting to our left is a blue tongue shape. Softly curved, swaying to our left, the color of aqua tinted water—this shape can be seen as a hole or a void. It is surrounded by an outer ribbon of white space that is tinged with tones of mint green and pale pink. The way this outer shape folds over the blue area intensifies the sense that we are gazing into the opening of an interior space. The curved white outer area is rimmed with a thin edge of pink and red—the colors bear a relationship to blood and flesh. Beyond this area are petal forms of pale violet outlined in red. These petals rest upon each other and morph into soft hills on our left. Behind these lavender petals is a crack between folds of pink and peach that rise to the top of the painting—a little left of center. Surrounding these folds and the soft fluttering petals that surround the white ribbon that homes the blue void from which we started this description is a background of light blue that turns to a pink violet in some areas and into light ripples in the upper right corner. O’Keeffe uses thin translucent washes of oil paint to create her seductive abstraction.