Her sense of confidence doesn't seem to be there. O'Keeffe's early watercolors were the first mature accomplishments of her career, most art historians and biographers say. Barbara Buhler Lynes, who studied some 2,300 works and rejected about 250 in compiling the O'Keeffe catalogue raisonne, has said that O'Keeffe was a very deliberate painter. O'Keeffe knew exactly what effect she'd get whenever she put pigment to paper, Lynes said. Thus, O'Keeffe was hardly one to settle for the kind of sloppy accident that so many of the Canyon Suite watercolors display.
All artists have their off days.
In addition, O'Keeffe knew the difference between good and bad in her work. She destroyed some of her lesser paintings. She had a feeling of what should be on the market. Charles C. Eldredge, a University of Kansas art historian, argued as much in an essay he wrote for art dealer Gerald Peters in 1989 that put the watercolors in the context of O'Keeffe's art and life. But others note that the catalogue raisonne shows that O'Keeffe apparently didn't make preliminary watercolors.