Dialogue by Mark:

In our Master's Gallery today, we're going to see a bone that became part of a great work of art. Kim, our archeologist of art history at KidsArt, brings us this painting by the American artist, Georgia O'Keeffe. It was painted in 1943 and is called "Pelvis with the Distance."

Georgia O'Keeffe decided she wanted to be a painter when she was a young girl. She studied art as much as she could. O'Keeffe later wrote about one of her high school art classes, where the teacher had students look closely at simple, small objects like flowers and draw the incredible detail in them.

For much of her life, O'Keeffe lived in northern new Mexico. She loved the wide open spaces of the high desert. Maybe she found this bleached white bone when she was out hiking one day...a "pelvis" or hip bone from a buffalo or a deer. She carried it back to her studio and sketched it's graceful curves.

Her painting shows the desert in the background...the "distance" in the title of the picture. First we see small, speckled hills with dots of sage-green trees, then far off blue mountains. But mostly we see the blue sky and the bone. O'Keeffe made it so big that it goes right off the edges of the picture. It totally fills our sight.

It's fun to look closely at tiny things and draw them really big, like the style that made Georgia O'Keeffe famous. Pick a small flower in your backyard or find a piece of driftwood or a dry tree branch. Then look at your object carefully and draw what you see. Draw it so big that you fill your drawing paper, all the way to the edges. Then paint or color your picture, but color the background first, like O'Keeffe painted the sky all around the bone. Thanks to the Indianapolis Museum of Art for today's Master's Gallery painting!