#9 with O'Keeffe

Paul Sarkisian has lived and worked in Santa Fe and environs for 40 years, since 1972. He is an accomplished painter whose career began in Los Angeles in the 1950s, where he showed at Ferus Gallery. #9 with O’Keeffe is done in a photo-realist style, which Sarkisian was noted for through the mid-1980s. The various rectangles of pure color contrast with the details rendered in the newspaper clipping and the postcard. Significantly, the newspaper clipping pictures Georgia O’Keeffe, with whom the Sarkisian family was friends, and shows the end of an article written by local artist Carol Mothner. In this sense, this painting gives the viewer a glimpse of what was happening in Santa Fe at the moment when this painting was created.