How did traveling by airplane inspire Georgia O’Keeffe’s later abstract paintings?

Beginning in 1959, Georgia O’Keeffe began traveling the world, and the views she observed from airplane windows became a primary source of inspiration for her later work.1

These aerial perspectives led her to deepen her commitment to abstraction, as she began creating a series of paintings that captured sky, land, and water configurations from high above the earth. While these works, such as Blue, Black and Grey (1960), are perceived by viewers as abstract, they were rooted in the reality of what O’Keeffe actually saw during her flights. This period marked a return to abstraction almost exclusively, utilizing shapes that recalled the abstract language she had first explored in the 1910s.1