My posting of this photograph,The Red Daisy, for RUBY TUESDAY, is inspired by fellow blogger, The Aware Writer, whose 'Ode to a Red Flower' was posted on Monday Musings: http://awarewriter.wordpress.com/
John McDevitt's musings and experiments with the photographic medium produced images that reminded me of Georgia O'Keeffe's approach to painting flowers. In short, creating images that are about the flower itself, and the photographer's ability to reveal a transformative inner dimension that the transient eye doesn't register. Today, photographers can go out on a limb with their imaginations and tools, just as O'keeffe decided to do with painting a little flower. Notably, McDevitt's experiments with an 'Ode to a Red Flower' became as abstract as some of O'Keeffe's flower paintings.
When O'Keeffe started painting flowers she wanted to paint what she SAW, not what people usually associated with flowers - the touching, the smelling, the gifting, the arranging. She said, "Still, in a way, nobody sees a flower, really, it is so small, we haven't time, and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time".
She thought that if she painted a flower, small, no one would see what she sees, so she decided to paint big. "I will make even busy New Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers".
This is O'keeffe's painting of a Red Poppy, 1927. Oil on canvas 7 x 9 taken from Georgia O'keeffe, A Studio Book, published by The Viking Press, New York (1976)
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