So said O'Keefe in describing what it's like to hold a flower and really to look at it.

O'Keefe managed to convey some of that wonder in paint. She grew them to huge size, setting them at or above human scale. She drew them in scorching colors, like "Poppy" or "Oriental poppy," or in stark lights and darks ("Jimson weed" and "Black hollyhock"). She displayed them with human passion, possibly drawing parallels between a plant's organs of regeneration and a human's ("Red canna" and "Yellow sweet peas"). Whatever you see in these - and different people will see differently - they are monumental presentations of something we think of as small and delicate. By itself, that's a message: the big and the small are equals in the world, when considered at their proper scale.

Maybe it's not fair to O'Keefe's ouvre to isolate one part of it like this - she preferred to show her work with a better balance of subjects and styles. These wonderful paintings deserve attention of their own, though. Some of the paintings are up to six feet tall and seven wide - even at 12"x10", book can't capture the full drama of the work. Still, it's an amazing collection.

//wiredweird

While the pictures are wonderful, for an aging dinosaur like myself they are just too small. It is very hard to see the pictures!

Would have given it 10 stars if it was just a larger book. Some of the flowers are only one inch high, much too small for me to appreciate the detail.

Where can we find this in an 8.5 x 11 version?

A picture is worth a thousand words; and one hundred pictures that happen to be O'Keeffe's are priceless. The works accurately portray the artist's keen eye for the beauty found in the smallest of mother earth's gifts: the flower. The book is an overall thorough and concise summary of the artist's most prized achievements.

O'Keeffe can magnify the beauty of flowers magically in her paintings. Her perception allows the everyday art lover to escape into God's garden and visualize the serenity found in heaven.