Red Canna is the Georgia O’Keeffe series featuring enlarged red canna lily flowers.
O’Keeffe began making flower paintings in the 1920s, often cropping and enlarging blossoms until their petals filled the picture plane. Red Canna paintings use intense reds, oranges, and darker passages to emphasize the flower’s layered, curving structure rather than presenting it as a small botanical specimen.
The series belongs to O’Keeffe’s broader exploration of close-up natural forms. She argued that people did not take time to look at flowers, so she made them large enough that viewers could not ignore them. Her flower images were sometimes interpreted symbolically, especially as sexual metaphors, but O’Keeffe resisted having the paintings reduced to those readings.
Red Canna is distinct from her Black Iris series and from Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1. All involve enlarged flowers, but their titles identify different plants and color-centered bodies of work.