When I became serious about flower photos, I became serious about Georgia O’Keeffe. Her fame was not associated with hot new art styles and trends but with her different visions of nature and flower photography.

She wanted to make art that brought people back to looking closely.

She seized on images that flower photographers I knew were interested in, hers based on finding essential and abstract forms in nature.

O’Keeffe’s primary subjects were landscapes, flowers, and bones, each explored in successive series over several years. She believed that people were so used to seeing images of flowers that they no longer noticed them.  Or they were too busy to look at them.

So she magnified pictures of calla lilies and irises, which became her most famous. She enlarged the tiniest petals to fill an entire canvas, a way of seeing flowers that appealed to me and excited me. People started looking at them and still are.

I am not Georgia O’Keefe, but I learned much from her writings and images. I decided my pictures would only occasionally be of single flowers standing alone; I would magnify the minor parts of flowers to capture their soul.

I rarely think of flowers alone (except for red roses); I always think of them as a group, a community, a whole.

I first tried my own idea of flowers as sculpture with my Calla Lilies, one of the most elegantly constructed flowers. However, it sparked a garden riot because I kept misspelling the name. Nobody even noticed the pictures.

I kept going and, of course, batting off the creepy legions, but the trolls and correction addicts would never stop me. People loved the fight but paid little attention to the art.

The flower’s names still mean little or nothing to me; the pictures matter. I’ll be back with Calla Lilies in the Spring.

This week, sick at home and with free time, I had a new idea. I called it “Flower Bombs,” yet another way of using color and magnification to get people to look at flowers again and feel some emotion.

My “Flower Bomb” idea is not unique, I’m sure, but it is very new to me. It’s another way I present flowers in a different light (literally) and advance my photographic work.

I spent hours working on this new idea and have more work to do. But I liked the first round. I hope you do, too. You are my audience and critics.

The photo above is one of them. I’m putting some more in this afternoon as part of my Flower Art series, where they belong. Come and take a look if you get the chance, and thanks for your encouragement. This looks natural; something is rotting inside me and needs to come out. It’s out.

People keep telling me my cat changed my life, but I know better. It was the flowers. O’Keeffe was correct when she said that most people see what they want to see and like what they want to like. I know what she means.

People are looking at my flower pictures. O’Keeffe is, obviously, my role model and inspiration. I continue to learn from her work.

I’m putting my “Flower Bombs” up around 4:30 Eastern Time.