Flowers were the subject Georgia O'Keeffe magnified in her best-known close-up paintings.
Beginning in the 1920s, O'Keeffe made large-scale paintings of flowers such as calla lilies, poppies, irises, and jimson weed. She enlarged the blossoms so dramatically that their petals and inner structures filled the canvas. The approach turned familiar natural objects into powerful abstract-looking forms.
O'Keeffe explained that people did not take time to look at flowers, which helped motivate her decision to paint them on a large scale. Critics and viewers sometimes interpreted the paintings as symbolic or sexual, but O'Keeffe rejected attempts to reduce her work to those readings.
Flowers were only one part of her career. She also painted New York skyscrapers, New Mexico landscapes, animal bones, shells, and abstract forms. Still, the flower paintings remain the images most closely associated with her name.