How an underrated US state inspired a legendary artist

The world of artist Georgia O'Keeffe is ochre and sage and electric blue. Ragged dirt roads stretching off into infinity. Mesas emerging like apocalyptic remnants from a moonscape. Lacquered skies dripping onto the stonewashed horizon.

It was this backdrop that first captivated the artist when she visited the town of Taos in 1929 as a guest of the arts patron and writer Mabel Dodge Luhan. The trip would alter her course – and define her life's work. Born and raised in Wisconsin, and resident of New York City with her husband, the photographer and modern art promoter Alfred Stieglitz, O'Keeffe had found her destiny.

These elements wash over me now as I climb up through the Sangre de Cristo Mountains towards Taos. Far below rolls the Rio Grande through the valleys; but up here the landmass is chiselled into unearthly hoodoos and snow-flecked peaks. I tunnel through forests of towering ponderosa pines and Douglas firs, pass the scattered remnants of Spanish villages and their churches casting dominion over the land.

But it was the enigmatic crosses she encountered on late night walks through the desert that became her most intriguing subjects."I saw the crosses so often – and often in unexpected places – like a thin dark veil of the Catholic Church spread over the New Mexico landscape," she later recalled.These were crosses erected by a secretive Catholic brotherhood called the Penitentes, whose members would practise agonising penances to atone for their sins.

By the time O'Keeffe arrived here from Abiquiu in 1934, the property was operating as a dude ranch."She thought dudes were a lower form of life," says Ghost Ranch guide Phil Shepherd."Privileged men from the east coast who'd come here to play cowboy." But the taciturn artist was won over by the configurations buttressing the landscape.

A SANCTUARY IN ABIQUIU All summer long, O'Keeffe would paint at Ghost Ranch, but when winter's snow cloaked the badlands and sucked the heat from its core, she retreated to the house she'd bought in Abiquiu in 1945. It had been a serendipitous discovery: heading down the old Chama Highway one day, she'd spotted a crumbling adobe wall and had found behind it an uninhabited Pueblo revival house.

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