Patricia Albers reviews the exhibition Modern Nature: Georgia O’Keeffe and Lake George at the de Young Fine Arts Museum, San Francisco, on view through May 11, 2014.

Albers writes: "Along with the magnified botanicals, the most compelling paintings are those that result from O’Keeffe’s weather eye on the lake. Lake George with White Birch catches a burst of light and colors on what must have been a rain-spattered day. The voluptuous Lake George takes cues from early morning mist and its reflection. The spatial complexities of the landscape intrigued her. Storm Cloud, Lake George interweaves near and far and twists the sky into copper ribbon. Lake George with Crows experiments with oblique projection, a strategy the artist would have seen in Japanese art. Autumn Trees, The Maple, which shuttles between figuration and abstraction,is indebted to both Mondrian’s trees as networks and to photographers’ use of shallow depth of field."