Georgia O’Keeffe: How to Make Flowers Impossible to Ignore
This botanical history post was featured on The Daily Gardener podcast:
November 15, 1887
On this day, Georgia O'Keeffe was born - an artist who would revolutionize how we see flowers through her bold, modernist vision.
Over her remarkable career, O'Keeffe created more than 900 works of art, but it's her dramatic, large-scale flower paintings that have become her most recognizable legacy.
A fascinating chapter in O'Keeffe's career unfolded in 1938 when, at age 51, she received an unexpected commission. The Hawaiian Pineapple Company (now Dole Food Company) offered her an all-expenses-paid nine-week trip to Hawaii in exchange for two paintings for their advertising campaign. In a delicious twist of irony, O'Keeffe never painted a single pineapple during her stay.
Instead, she was drawn to the island's non-native tropical flowers. In fact, none of her Hawaiian floral paintings featured plants indigenous to the islands. O'Keeffe's eye was caught by South American transplants: the vibrant Bougainvillea (boo-guhn-VIL-yuh), fragrant Plumeria (ploo-MEER-ee-uh), dramatic Heliconia (hel-ih-KON-yuh), delicate Calliandra (kal-ee-AN-druh), and the statuesque White Bird of Paradise.
O'Keeffe's relationship with her botanical subjects was wonderfully complex. She famously declared,
"I hate flowers - I paint them because they're cheaper than models, and they don't move!"
Yet she also offered this tender observation:
"Nobody sees a flower—really—it is so small it takes time—we haven't time—and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time."
Her solution to this modern blindness to nature's beauty was revolutionary:
I decided that if I could paint that flower in a huge scale, you could not ignore its beauty.
This approach wasn't mere artistic preference - it was a radical act that forced viewers to confront the overlooked elegance of the natural world.
While some critics dismissed her flower paintings as merely sentimental or accessible, they missed the revolutionary nature of her cropped, magnified views. These weren't just pretty pictures - they were modernist manifestos painted in pollen and petals.
