Georgia O'Keeffe famously enlarged flowers in many of her paintings.
She began painting flowers on a large scale in the 1920s, turning familiar blossoms into immersive compositions of petals, folds, and color. Works such as Black Iris III and Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1 show how she cropped and magnified a single flower until it filled much of the canvas.
O'Keeffe explained that people often overlooked flowers because they were small and commonplace, so she painted them large enough to make viewers stop and look. Critics frequently interpreted the flower paintings as symbols of sexuality, but O'Keeffe rejected that narrow reading. Her subjects also included skyscrapers, bones, trees, clouds, and desert landscapes.