Georgia O'Keeffe was among the first internationally known American artists to train exclusively in the United States and to find her subjects at home. By 1915 she was developing a working method based on magnifying and simplifying details to create abstract compositions from the lines, forms, and tonal values found in nature...Blue I belongs to a series of paintings that relate to O'Keeffe's visual memories of her extensive international air travel between 1957 and 1979. The experience of looking down on the world from an airplane gave her new ways of seeing two familiar aspects of nature--rivers and the sky. In her modernist process of gradually abstracting colors and shapes from nature, she may in this case have combined the forms of rivers, seen from above as deep blue stripes, with the shapes of horizontal layers of cloud, crossed by a diagonal wisp of jet stream or smoke.

from Snite Museum of Art, Selected Works: Snite Museum of Art (Notre Dame, 2005)