Flower paintings of Georgia O'Keeffe
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The American artist Georgia O'Keeffe is best known for her close-up, or large-scale flower paintings,[1] which she painted from the mid-1920s through the 1950s.[2] She made about 200 paintings of flowers of the more than 2,000 paintings that she made over her career.[3] One of her paintings, Jimson Weed, sold for $44.4 million, making it the most expensive painting sold of a female artist's work as of 2014[update].[1]
O'Keeffe experimented with depicting flowers in her high school art class. Her teacher explained how important it was to examine the flower before drawing it. So, O'Keeffe held it in different ways, capturing different perspectives of the flowers, and also created studies of only a portion of the flower. During this process she also drew the flower simpler with each iteration.[4]
After she had been painting for a few years, she became discouraged, and when she began painting again, she remembered the technique she had learned earlier to see things in a different way.[4]
Influenced by photography
By the mid-1920s, O'Keeffe began making large-scale paintings of natural forms at close range, as if seen through a magnifying lens.[5] O'Keeffe learned modernist photography techniques, like close-cropping, from Paul Strand and others.[2] Strand was particularly influential in her development of cropped, close-up images. She received unprecedented acceptance as a female artist from the fine art world due to her powerful graphic images.[6] Depictions of small flowers that fill the canvas suggest the immensity of nature and encourage viewers to looks at flowers differently.[2]
A flower is relatively small. Everyone has many associations with a flower - the idea of flowers. You put out your hand to touch the flower — lean forward to smell it — maybe touch it with your lips almost without thinking — or give it to someone to please them. Still — in a way — nobody sees a flower — really — it is so small — we haven't time — and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time... So I said to myself — I'll paint what I see — what the flower is to me but I'll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking time to look at it — I will make even busy New-Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers... Well — I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower, you hung all your own associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower — and I don't.[7]
Examples of some of her close-up images of flowers include Oriental Poppies,[5][8] several Red Canna paintings,[9] and what has been described as her first large-scale flower painting, Petunia No. 2 (1924).[10]
