What artistic techniques make Georgia O’Keeffe’s flower paintings look like close-up views?

Georgia O’Keeffe achieved the distinctive close-up effect in her flower paintings through a combination of large-scale formatting and techniques borrowed from photography, such as extreme cropping and magnification.1

By rendering her subjects on an enormous scale and presenting them as if viewed through a magnifying lens, O’Keeffe forced viewers to engage with the flowers in a new, focused way. These compositions often utilized the Modernist aesthetic of "less is more," stripping away extraneous detail to highlight the inherent abstract shapes—such as ovals, spirals, and V-shapes—found within the natural forms.21

While critics often attempted to interpret these magnified, sensuous petals through a gendered or Freudian lens, O’Keeffe consistently rejected these characterizations. She maintained that her work was a direct, professional expression of her own experiences, stating that she painted the flowers "big" specifically so that people would be "surprised into taking time to look at it".21