Overview
Georgia O’Keeffe directly addressed her experience with migraine in her artistic practice. When discussing her drawing Special Drawing No. 9 (1915), O’Keeffe stated: “Drawing No. 9 is the drawing of a headache. It was a very bad headache. Well, I had the headache, why not do something with it?”
This explicit connection between neurological experience and artistic expression sets O’Keeffe apart. She did not merely speculate about the sources of her vision; she deliberately used migraine as subject matter and as a catalyst for artistic creation. Biographer Laurie Lisle reported that O’Keeffe visualized images of some of her abstract paintings during migraine attacks, suggesting that migraine aura directly shaped her visual imagination.
O’Keeffe’s abstract forms—her flowing curves, her exploration of interior spatial relationships, and her use of color and scale to evoke psychological states—gain new dimension when understood through the lens of migraine experience. Her work demonstrates that migraine can serve not as obstacle to creativity but as a legitimate, even generative source of artistic vision.
