Georgia O'Keeffe's 1924 painting featuring a large red canna flower is titled Red Canna.
The work belongs to O'Keeffe's celebrated flower paintings, in which she enlarged close views of blossoms so that petals and folds fill much of the composition. Red Canna is a vivid example of her use of saturated color and simplified organic form during the 1920s.
O'Keeffe painted many flowers, but the canna became one of her recurring subjects. Her flower paintings have often been interpreted as symbolic or sexual, especially by critics who focused on their enlarged forms. O'Keeffe rejected the idea that viewers needed to impose such meanings, emphasizing instead that people should look closely at flowers themselves.
Red Canna is different from the later Black Iris works and from the famous 1932 painting often discussed in connection with her flower imagery. The title identifies the plant and its dominant color directly.