Focus on this artwork and analyze the Background.
A gardener, O'Keeffe was often inspired to make a dozen or more paintings of a specific flower. She became interested in brilliant colors and billowy petals of the canna lilies when she visited Lake George, New York in 1918 with Alfred Stieglitz. The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts states that "In these extreme close-ups she established a new kind of modern still life with no references to atmospheric effects or realistic details, reflecting her statement, 'I paint because color is significant.'"As she evolved as an artist, her works became suggestive of female form, like Inside Red Canna. Paul Rosenfeld, who owned one of her Red Canna paintings, said "... there is no stroke laid by her brush, whatever it is she may paint, that is not curiously, arrestingly female in quality. Essence of very womanhood permeates her pictures."
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Pennsylvania Alfred Stieglitz Paul Rosenfeld