Georgia O'Keeffe Quotes

106 Sourced Quotes

I've been absolutely terrified every moment of my life - and I've never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do.

Georgia O'Keeffe
I found things I could say with color and shapes that I couldn't say in any other way... things I had no words for.

Georgia O'Keeffe
I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me - shapes and ideas so near to me - so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn't occurred to me to put them down.

Georgia O'Keeffe
Equal Rights and Responsibilities is a basic idea that would have very important psychological effects on women and men from the time they are born. It could very much change the girl child's idea of her place in the world... It seems to me very important to the idea of true democracy – to my country – and to the world eventually – that all men and women stand equal under the sky – I wish that you could be with us in this fight..

Georgia O'Keeffe
Those perilous climbings [with her sister Claudia, in the Palo Duro Canyon, 1916] were frightening, but it was wonderful to me and not like anything I had known before. The fright of the day was still with me in the night and I would often dream that the foot of my bed rose straight up into the air — then just as it was to fall I would wake up. Many drawings came from days like that, and later some oil paintings.

Georgia O'Keeffe
So, probably.... when I started painting the pelvis bones I was most interested in the holes in the bones — what I saw through them - particularly the blue from holding them up in the sun against the sky as one is apt to do when one seems to have more sky than earth in one's world.... they were most beautiful against the Blue — that Blue that will always be there as it is now after all man's destruction is finished.

Georgia O'Keeffe
I hate flowers. I only paint them because they're cheaper than models and they don't move.

Georgia O'Keeffe
I painted 'the Shelton with Sunspots' [New York], in 1926. I went out one morning to look at it before I started to work and there was the optical illusion of a bite out of one side of the tower made by the sun, with sunspots against the building and against the sky. I made that painting beginning at the upper left and went off at the lower right without going back.

Georgia O'Keeffe
War is killing the individual in it unless he has learned livingness — if he had it he wouldn't be a good soldier.

Georgia O'Keeffe
After I had been in Canada painting the wide white barns along the Saint Lawrence river, I thought how different the life of the Canadian farmer was from life in Cebolla. So I painted [in 1945] the Cebolla church which is so typical of that difficult life. I have always thought it one of my very good paintings, though its message is not as pleasant as many of the others.

Georgia O'Keeffe
It is surprising to me to see how many people separate the objective from the abstract. Objective painting is not good painting unless it is good in the abstract sense. A hill or tree cannot make a good painting just because it is a hill or a tree. It is lines and colours put together so that they say something. For me that is the very basis of painting. The abstraction is often the most definite form for the intangible thing in myself that I can only clarify in paint.

Georgia O'Keeffe
I often lay on that bench looking up into the tree, past the trunk and up into the branches. It was particularly fine at night with the stars above the tree.

Georgia O'Keeffe
School and things that painters have taught me even keep me from painting as I want to. I decided I was a very stupid fool not to be at least paint as I wanted to and say what I wanted to when I painted as that seemed to be the only thing I could do that didn't concern anybody but myself... I found that I could say things with colour and shapes that I couldn't say in any other way things that I had no words for.

Georgia O'Keeffe
I decided to start anew, to strip away what I had been taught.

Georgia O'Keeffe
Anita, I have just come the comforting conclusion that I'll have to paint acres and acres of water color landscapes before I will look for even a passably fair one. After about ten attempts — I certainly have to laugh at myself — It's like feeling around in the dark — thought I knew what I was going to try to do but I find I don't — and guess I'll only find out by slaving away at it. I feel — like a wreck — Have been working like mad all day — and you know how deliciously disgusted with every thing one can be — when the sun begins to go down — and one has been working ones head off all day. It gives me the sensation I used to have when I was a youngster and was going away from home on the train — It is a very special sort of sick feeling.

Georgia O'Keeffe
Dear Anita [Anita Pollitzer], don't forget Mary Cassatt [as one of her inspirations] — and I am not sure that your new paragraph will hold water [Anita had sent her a chapter of the biography she was writing about Georgia] — We [artists] probably all derive from something — with some it is more obvious than with others — so much so that we can not escape a language of line that has been growing in meaning since the beginning of lines.

Georgia O'Keeffe
The morning is the best time, there are no people around. My pleasant disposition likes the world with nobody in it.

Georgia O'Keeffe
Artists and religionists are never far apart, they go to the sources of revelation for what they choose to experience and what they report is the degree of their experiences. Intellect wishes to arrange — intuition wishes to accept.

Georgia O'Keeffe
I am on the train going back to Stieglitz – and in a hurry to get there – I have had four months west and it seems to be all that I needed – It has been like the wind and the sun – there doesn't seem to have been a crack of the waking day or night that wasn't full – I haven't gained an ounce in weight but I feel so alive that I am apt to crack at any moment..

Georgia O'Keeffe
On the way I stood a moment looking out across the marshes with tall cattails, a patch of water, more marsh, then the woods with a few birch trees shining white at the edge on beyond. In the darkness it all looked just like I felt. Wet and swampy and gloomy, very gloomy. In the morning I painted it. My memory of it is that it was probably my best painting that summer..

Georgia O'Keeffe