Georgia OKeeffe Flower Drawings

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We began this lesson by looking at the large flower paintings of American painter Georgia O’Keeffe, (1887-1986). We discussed her style in terms of her large compositions, use of minimal backgrounds, and how she often created a sense of abstraction with “extreme close-ups”. Using flower catalogs as reference, each student created a large pencil composition of one or two flowers. We cropped our drawings to help create the “zoomed in” style seen in O’keeffe’s work. Oil pastel was used to add color, and students were encouraged to utilize blending, mixing and layering techniques to achieve a close color match to the reference photo.