4 ideas
O'Keeffe says she enlarged flowers because people in a hurried city do not take time to see something small, so she painted them big to surprise viewers into looking. It worked, and she then reports that viewers who finally looked hung their own associations on her flowers and wrote as if she thought and saw what they did, and she didn't. The episode shows a formal decision that produced attention but not control over what that attention would find.
O'Keeffe argues that the symbolic, especially sexual, readings of her flowers came from critics' own associations, not from anything she put there. When someone reads a meaning into an image and attributes it to the artist's intent, that meaning is evidence about the viewer's mind. Her captions reassert the maker's account of where and why a work was made as a correction, not as one more reading among equals.
O'Keeffe recounts that in 1915 she looked at her work, saw it was shaped by what her teachers had taught her, and decided to put that aside and start again. Limiting herself to charcoal on paper, she worked from shapes she found in her own head. Abstract drawings from that year, which Alfred Stieglitz later exhibited, became the start of her independent career.
O'Keeffe ties each painting to a concrete place and object: the Pedernal visible from Ghost Ranch, which she called her private mountain, and bones picked up on New Mexico desert walks. She says the bones cut sharply to the center of something keenly alive on the desert. Seen this way, subjects come from sustained, repeated attention to what is physically near, and she held that color could say things more exactly than words.