Georgia O'Keeffe often painted animal bones after collecting them in the New Mexico desert. Cow, ram, and other bones became recurring subjects in her Southwestern paintings, where she enlarged their forms and placed them against open skies or landscapes.
The bones appealed to O'Keeffe as objects with strong shapes, pale surfaces, and a sense of survival. She did not treat them simply as scientific specimens; she used them as formal and symbolic elements within carefully organized compositions.
Her bone paintings are sometimes grouped with her flower paintings because both subjects use close-up views and enlarged forms. The subjects differ, but O'Keeffe's interest in contour, scale, and abstraction links the two bodies of work.