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. 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. For O'Keeffe, there was no hidden symbolism, just the essence of the flower. 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.
She stated that "nobody really sees a flower - really - it is so small - we haven't time - and to see takes time. In this painting, she magnifies the flower's form to emphasize its shape and color. 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. From the 1940s through the 1960s in particular, O'Keeffe's art was outside the mainstream as she was one of the few artists to adhere to representation in a period when others were exploring non-representation or had abandoned painting altogether. Through intense observation of nature, experimentation with scale, and nuanced use of line and color, O'Keeffe's art remained grounded in representation even while pushing at its limits.While some of these works are highly detailed, in others, she stripped away what she considered the inessential to focus on shape and color. She worked in series, synthesizing abstraction and realism to produce works that emphasized the primary forms of nature. O'Keeffe did not follow any specific artistic movement, but like Arthur Dove she experimented with abstracting motifs from nature.O'Keeffe incorporated the techniques of other artists and was especially influenced by Paul Strand's use of cropping in his photographs she was one of the first artists to adapt the method to painting by rendering close-ups of uniquely American objects that were highly detailed yet abstract.
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