After you’ve seen a selection of Georgia O’Keeffe’s flower paintings, you can’t really think about a jack-in-the-pulpit, a calla lily, or a morning glory in the same way ever again. In a 1926 catalog, she said, “Everyone has many associations with a flower. You put out your hand to touch it, or lean forward to smell it, or maybe touch it with your lips almost without thinking, or give it to someone to please them. But one rarely takes the time to really see a flower. I have painted what each flower is to me and I have painted it big enough so that others would see what I see. Her photographer husband Alfred Steiglitz may have influenced her vision; some commentaries on her work point out the way she painted backgrounds and even some parts of her flowers out of focus to accentuate the sharper important elements. Whenever I try to capture close-up views of my garden flowers, I think about their resemblance to some of her paintings. In addition to this example, click here to see more little-bit-of-O’Keeffe images. At a current exhibit at Rochester’s Memorial Art Gallery, paintings and pastels from the full spectrum of subjects she favored are arrayed with photographs of her young adult years through graceful old age. I didn’t know that she produced a great many paintings of New York City, Lake George, and conventional still-life subjects such as apples in addition to her well-known bleached desert bones, flowers, and New Mexico landscapes. I realized with a start that some of the most famous photographs of her were done not by her husband but by family friend Todd Webb, although Steiglitz’s photographs of her hands and her work milieu are also touching and beautiful.