Georgia O'Keefe - Petunia No. 2 1924

Oil on canvas - Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe

"It was in the 1920s, when nobody had time to reflect, that I saw a still-life painting with a flower that was perfectly exquisite, but so small you really could not appreciate it." Georgia O'Keeffe

I have lost count of the days and settled in to a routine of sorts. I find myself in the studio working with a simple theme and familiar shapes. I am focusing on pattern to evoke the repetitive nature of this time. I selected Petunia 2 painted by Georgia O'Keefe in 1924 because it marks the beginning of her exploration into the subject that she is famous for. She stated that "nobody really sees a flower - really - it is so small - we haven't time - and to see takes time... So I said to myself - I'll paint what I see - what the flower is to me but I'll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking time to look at it." 

About the Painting from theartstory.com
Petunia No. 2, one of O'Keeffe's first large-scale renderings of a flower, represents the beginning of her exploration of a theme that would mark her career. In this painting, she magnifies the flower's form to emphasize its shape and color. She stated that "nobody really sees a flower - really - it is so small - we haven't time - and to see takes time... So I said to myself - I'll paint what I see - what the flower is to me but I'll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking time to look at it." Her flower images often received interpretations that O'Keeffe disagreed with, particularly from feminist critics who saw these paintings as veiled illusions to female genitalia. For O'Keeffe, there was no hidden symbolism, just the essence of the flower. In fact, the anatomy of the petunia is incredibly detailed, and O'Keeffe may have been emphasizing the androgyny of the reproductive parts in order to counter the idea that her subject matter was connected to her gender. Though American and European artists had experimented with abstraction for at least a decade, O'Keeffe, like Dove, focused on images from nature and O'Keeffe was the only artist to consistently use flowers as a motif.

About the Artist from Wikipedia 
Georgia Totto O'Keeffe (November 15, 1887 – March 6, 1986) was an American artist. She was known for her paintings of enlarged flowers, New York skyscrapers, and New Mexico landscapes. O'Keeffe has been recognized as the "Mother of American modernism".[1][2] 

Resources
​https://www.brainyquote.com/authors/georgia-okeeffe-quotes
https://www.theartstory.org/artist/okeeffe-georgia/artworks/#nav
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_O%27Keeffe