Large Dark Red Leaves on White 

Editor: We're looking at Georgia O'Keeffe's "Large Dark Red Leaves on White," an oil painting that almost overwhelms you with its scale. The stark contrast of the red against the white is quite striking. What jumps out at you in this piece? Curator: The painting's impact lies heavily in O'Keeffe's bold manipulation of scale, color, and, most importantly, the materiality of paint. She builds up the surface, almost sculptural, drawing attention to the sheer physicality of the oil paint itself. Consider, too, the social context. Modernism pushed artists away from mere representation. O'Keeffe’s extraction of the botanical into abstraction reveals a radical reframing of our relationship to the natural world and the processes needed to present such natural items using the labor inherent to the oil on canvas painting technique. Editor: So it's not just about seeing a leaf, but about understanding the choices behind depicting it that way? Curator: Exactly. How does the industrial production of oil paint—tubes upon tubes made readily available for consumption and creativity—influence O’Keeffe's approach? Does she celebrate or critique that consumption through this painting? What are we consuming, when viewing, and therefore consuming again as meaning from her abstracted landscapes? Editor: That makes me consider the labor involved in creating this image - both in the natural growing of a leaf and in the creation of oil on canvas artwork. It does make me see it differently now. Curator: It encourages a closer consideration of not just "what" is depicted, but "how," "why," and by "whom," expanding our comprehension beyond purely aesthetic interpretations and encouraging us to remember the hand and materials used to render these images, and all images surrounding us in turn.