Georgia O'Keeffe's Deer's Skull with Pedernal shows the artist's uncanny ability to tap into the transcendental potentials of the landscape of a particular place.

In this case it is the village of Abiquiú, near Pedernal Mountain, in the lands of the Pueblo peoples, claimed by settlers as New Mexico. She needed a Western escape from her relationship with the two-timing Alfred Stieglitz, who wrote her many sad letters, but never an apology song like Jay-Z did for Beyonce, in "4:44." Abiquiú, originally founded as a refuge from war in the early 1700's by Tewa people and a Roman Catholic priest, and now a town essentially dedicated to O'Keeffe, features in an episode of AMC's Breaking Bad. In this episode, Jesse Pinkman's love interest, Jane Margolis, says that O'Keeffe was "just trying to make a good feeling last." 

O'Keeffe, a descendant of Hungarian and Irish immigrants, is one of very few artists to make a painting of the North American landscape that suggests the feeling of spirituality or prayer. This inspired a sense of awe which gave way to a desire to possess a place among the indigenous people themselves. The artist said that there was only one person whose looks she envied: Albedia, an indigenous woman who served meals at the ranch of Mabel Dodge Luhan, O'Keeffe's friend and patron. Of course, it's unlikely that O'Keeffe would have actually wanted to have a darker skin color: she wanted, as many U.S. citizens do, to connect with the Creator through the land and the indigenous people. Blind in her old age, she learned hand pottery. She famously said that the Creator gave her personal ownership of Pedernal mountain, and this painting evokes that kind of conviction. Her biographer, Roxana Robinson, writes, "The oblique profile of the Pedernal...spoke to her. It was her landscape." Indeed, O'Keeffe herself once stated, "“It’s my private mountain. It belongs to me. God told me if I painted it enough, I could have it.” Eight hundred years ago, the mountain once hosted people which archeologists call the Gallina, a non-Pueblo nation with significant cultural differences from their neighbors.

O'Keeffe spent a lifetime facing critical sub-categorization of her work due to her gender, and she did not have the chance to benefit from more recent re-evaluations of her work which give voice to the work itself, which is what she wanted. She chose one of her masterpieces, White Flower, for the entrance for a retrospective which included the Deer's Skull with Pedernal, two years after finishing the latter work. This piece is one of the ways in which she turned her mental breakdown, caused in part by her marriage to Stieglitz and his affair with the photographer Dorothy Norman just four years after the wedding, into a breakthrough. Ten years before the Norman affair, in a strange letter, Stieglitz had written her, "I know you are a woman — First — & always — I know you need a home — a child — Those take a man to give you — I am not a man — That's my curse." Preemptive apology? Disclaimer? Possibly both. In any case, it is a good thing O'Keeffe had the tranquility of the desert, along with her own "personal mountain" to escape the chaos of her personal life.