Architect Beverley Spears designed one door in the Santa Fe residence featured on page 48 as a respectful allusion to Georgia O’Keeffe. The artist painted many pictures of a patio door at her Abiquiu house in varying degrees of abstraction. Through an angling stucco wall and contrasting door, Spears particularly references the work titled “Patio with Black Door, 1955” and more generally measures the degree to which O’Keeffe remains an almost gravitational influence on aesthetics in the visual arts and even home design in New Mexico. While her fiercely imagined landscapes and provocative, explosive flower portraits have become emblematic of her monstrous talent, she also painted buildings and parts of buildings, from skyscrapers in Manhattan to barns in Canada to churches in New Mexico.

In O’Keeffe’s adobe homes, she purified an interior design mode of ascetic simplicity punctuated by talismans scavenged from her walkabouts in the desert—bones and skulls, most popularly. She didn’t invent the cow skull as found sculpture; she just canonized it.

I suspect she loved architecture, preferring to paint exteriors more than interiors. Certainly and quite manifestly, she loved her two New Mexico houses. In her illustrated autobiography, Georgia O’Keeffe, her commentary for “Patio with Black Door, 1955” reveals its seductive power: “That wall with a door in it was something I had to have.” In this unadorned spot she found a resonant, elusive clarity that repeatedly challenged her creative imagination. O’Keeffe conceived the series of patio door paintings in a wide range of perspectives, viewing angles, and moods—a body of work revealing an artist repeatedly stimulated anew by an intimate fragment of her world.