Georgia O’Keeffe O’Keeffe’s page
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Flower Abstraction

1924

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Georgia O’Keeffe, Flower Abstraction, 1924. Oil on canvas, 48 × 30 in. (121.9 × 76.2 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; 50th Anniversary Gift of Sandra Payson 85.47

Georgia O’Keeffe began working on her flower paintings around 1919, creating closely cropped and enlarged compositions that were not always immediately recognizable as flowers. At once abstract and realistic, the spirals and wave-like forms of her flowers suggest the movement and flow of growth. As O’Keeffe explained, she chose the magnified scale for the effect it would have on viewers: “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.” Her friend and fellow artist Marsden Hartley once said that her flowers are “so huge that they shut out the sky above them—shut out even the morning that opens them.”

MORE WORK BY Georgia O’Keeffe

7 WORKS

up close and personal

What you’ll need

A natural object, a magnifying glass or viewfinder, colored pencils, paper

Choose an object from nature that interests you and makes you want to look closely. This could be a leaf, flower, stick, shell, fruit or vegetable—you choose!
Look at your object as a whole. What are some shapes and lines you notice? Draw your object on a piece of paper, and try to include the whole thing. See if you can draw your object so big it fills the page.
Using a magnifying glass or a viewfinder, look closely at your object. A viewfinder is a tool that helps you look at something through a specific shape or window, similar to the viewfinder you see on a camera. If you don’t have one, cut or tear a hole in a piece of paper and look through that. What lines, shapes and colors can you see?
Think of the edges of your piece of paper as if it were the frame of your viewfinder, and draw what you see in the viewfinder on the piece of paper. Again, try and fill the whole space if you can.

When you are finished, look at both of your drawings together. Even though they are drawings of the same object, compare them. What looks different? What looks the same?

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