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Powerful Flowers

Georgia O’Keeffe painted little flowers in a big way

December 2011

Georgia O’Keeffe was inspired by many things in nature, especially flowers. Poppies, lilies, irises, and jimsonweed were among her favorite subjects, and during her long career, she created more than 200 flower and plant paintings.   

Flowers: Up Close

Georgia O’Keeffe, Corn No. 1, Dark, 1924. Oil on wood fiberboard, 31 ¾ x 11 7/8 in. Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1950 (50.236.1). The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image©The Metropolitan Museum of Art / Art Resource, NY.  ©Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Georgia O’Keeffe said, “I often painted fragments of things because it made my statement better than than the whole could.” Do you agree?

O’Keeffe began painting flowers during the 1920s, not long after she moved to New York. She monumentalized the flowers, painting them as if they had been magnified. She chose to paint them up close because she wanted the paintings to have a big impact on viewers. O’Keeffe said, “If I could paint the flower on a huge scale, you could not ignore its beauty.”

O’Keeffe’s first large-scale plant painting was Corn, No. 1, Dark (far left). It was of the corn growing in the garden at her vacation home in Lake George, New York. O’Keeffe said, “Every morning, a little drop of dew would have run down the veins into the center of the plant like a little lake.”  

In the painting, O’Keeffe cropped and enlarged the plant to focus attention on these details. A white vertical line representing the path of the dewdrop cuts the composition in half. It draws your attention to the focal point, the circular blue “little lake.”  

Jimson Weed, 1932. Oil on canvas, 48 x 40 in. Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. Gift of the Burnett Foundation (1996.01.01) ©2011 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

The focal point of the corn painting (above) is the blue “little lake.” What is the focal point of Jimson Weed?

Pretty & Poisonous

O’Keeffe discovered jimsonweed on one of her visits to New Mexico. The flowers open only at dusk and close during the heat of the day. They are poisonous and give off a sweet fragrance. O’Keeffe said, “When I think of the delicate fragrance of the flowers, I almost feel the coolness and sweetness of the evening.” Jimsonweed was one of her favorite subjects.

In Jimson Weed (above), she conveyed the “coolness of the evening” by using a simple palette of cool colors—green and blue—paired with a white and pale green flower. She painted the pinwheel-shape flower using a pattern of curvilinear lines on the petals. This pattern is repeated in the leaves. O’Keeffe also used light and shadow to make the flower look three-dimensional.

Oriental Poppies, 1927. Oil on canvas, 30 x 40 1/8 in.  Collection of the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Museum purchase. 1937.1. ©2011 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

“If you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it is your world for a moment.” —Georgia O’Keeffe

Small Flowers, Big Statement

Poppies were another favorite flower of O’Keeffe’s. In Oriental Poppies (above), two flowers nearly fill the entire canvas. The artist chose a color scheme of vibrant, fiery warm tones of red and orange. The colors become darker toward the centers of the flowers, creating a sense of depth. It is difficult to tell where the subjects end and the background begins. Can you trace your finger along the edges of each flower?

When O’Keeffe exhibited her flower paintings, critics were surprised that the canvases were so large compared with the actual subjects. Some of the canvases were more than three feet long! One reviewer wrote that looking at the flowers was “as if we humans were butterflies.” Do O’Keeffe’s paintings make you think about flowers and plants in a new way?

“ I have painted what each flower is to me and I have painted it big enough so that others would see what I see.” —Georgia O’Keeffe

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