Georgia O'Keeffe is well known for her large paintings of flowers. The way she explained it, she painted flowers outside of normal scale so that people would be surprised by them, and would view them with fresh eyes.

But she was a Modernist. Her goal wasn't to make statement about botany. At the risk of oversimplifying, it was to have people perceive flowers in abstract painting terms, as pure color and pure form.

O’Keeffe (1887 – 1986) was an innovative modernist who diverged from accepted artistic styles to paint images that were unlike any she had been taught. Her paintings, like “Oriental Poppies, 1928,” accentuate the beauty and importance of the flower by magnifying it to monumental size. By painting enormous, vibrantly hued flowers, the art conveyed O’Keeffe’s wonderment at nature by removing the subjects from any recognizable context and transforming their organic forms into powerful abstracts.