Georgia O'Keeffe's Flower paintings

... life really showed her femininity, she had always been sort of manly looking, she always had her hair cut short and never wore anything showing her body off. However, during the time Stieglitz and OŽKeeffe knew each other, Stieglitz had become obsessed with photographing Georgia since the beginning of their relationship. He would take over 300 portraits of her between 1918 and 1937.They were mostly erotic pictures, showing OŽKeeffeŽs femininity. This was the period where her flowers were produced. "I know now that most people are so closely concerned with themselves that they are not aware of their own individuality, I can see myself, and it has helped me to say what I want to say...in paint." Her choice to paint these flowers was influenced by

"her early training, natural attraction to flowers, and the idea of something fresh and fragile" was how OŽKeeffe described her first attraction to draw these flowers . she always said that she believed people did not have time to look and appreciate things so she drew them large so that people would stop and see them. I believe that Alfred Stieglitz had an effect on her, which helped her express what she had been longing too all her childhood. Close observations of O'Keeffe's flowers show that she never really pursued the realistic approach. She didn't paint every petal and detail. Instead she gave her flowers a life of their own, and expression that changed significantly between 1918 and 1938. Her red canna painting gradually enlarged the central flower image and brought it closer to the edges of the canvas. Between 1926 and 1929 she painted a group of views of New York City. In 1929 she went to new Mexico and that was when she got her inspiration to draw her desert scopes. These pictures lacked a middle distance: Objects appeared either very near or very far in the desert air. This is a total contrast from her views of enlarged flowers. Which I believe is because, she grew up, she accepted what had happened to her, she was able to find peace at last in new Mexico. Georgia O'Keeffe approached her subjects, whether buildings or flowers, landscapes or bones, by intuitively magnifying their shapes and simplifying their details to underscore their essential beauty. Her painting of Black Cross, is a large, dark cross which seems to stand watch over the rolling hills at sunset, proclaiming man's presence in this stark landscape ...