Georgia O'Keeffe Quotes

106 Sourced Quotes

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
Stones, bones, clouds — experience gives me shapes — but sometimes the shapes I paint end up having no resemblance to the actual experience.

Georgia O'Keeffe
When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it's your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else. Most people in the city rush around so, they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether they want to or not.

Georgia O'Keeffe
I believe an artist is the last person in the world who can afford to be affected.

Georgia O'Keeffe
I don't see why we ever think of what others think of what we do – no matter who they are. Isn't it enough just to express yourself?

Georgia O'Keeffe
Where I was born and how I have lived is unimportant. It is what I have done with where I have been that should be of interest.

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
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
A flower touches almost everyone's heart. A red hill doesn't touch everyone's heart as it touches mine.

Georgia O'Keeffe
The clean clear colours [of a Shanty farm] were in my head. But one day as I looked at the brown burned wood of the Shanty, I thought 'I can paint one of those dismal-coloured paintings like the men. I think just for fun I will try — all low-toned and dreary with the tree besides the door.' In my next show [c. 1923], 'The Shanty' went up. The men seemed to approve of it. They seemed to think that maybe I was beginning to paint.... that was my only low-toned dismal-coloured painting.

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 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
I like an empty wall because I can imagine what I like on it.

Georgia O'Keeffe
I think more about tomorrow than today or yesterday. I'm not a regretter. I suppose I could live in a jail as long as I had a little patch of blue sky to look at. But this is my kind of world. The kind of things on sees in cities... well, you know, it's better to look out the window at the sage.

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
I don't remember where I picked up the head — or the hollyhock. Flowers were planted among the vegetables in the garden between the house and the hills and I probably picked the hollyhock one day as I walked past. My paintings sometimes grow by pieces from what is around... I have used these things to say what is to me the wideness and wonder of the world as I live in it.

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
I took back a barrel of bones to New York. They were my symbols of the desert, but nothing more. I haven't seen enough to think of any other symbolism. The skulls were there and I could say something with them.

Georgia O'Keeffe
I had wanted to talk with you about lots of things... I am anxious to get to work for the fall – it is always my best time I had one particular painting – that tree in Lawrence's front yard as you see it when you lie under it on the table – with stars – it looks as tho it is standing on its head – I wanted you to see it..

Georgia O'Keeffe
I don't very much enjoy looking at paintings in general. I know too much about them. I take them apart.

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
I don't really know where I got my artists idea. The scraps of what I remember do not explain to me where it came from. I only know that by this time [her eight grade's year] it was definitely settled in my mind.

Georgia O'Keeffe
The large 'White Flower' [she painted in 1929] with the golden heart is something I have to say about White – quite different from what White has been meaning to me. Whether the flower or the color is the focus I do not know. I do know that the flower is painted large to convey to you my experience of the flower – and what is my experience of the flower if it is not color.

Georgia O'Keeffe
God told me if I painted that mountain enough, I could have it.

Georgia O'Keeffe
It seems odd to think of you at Lake George tonight – I can smell the outdoors – and hear it – and see the stars – So often before I went to bed at night I would walk out toward the barn and look at the sky in the open space. There was no light little house – there were no people – there was only the night – I will never go back again – maybe to stand just for a moment where I put the little bit that was left of Alfred [Alfred Stieglitz, her husband] after he was cremated – but I think not even for that. I put him where he would hear the lake. – That is finished.

Georgia O'Keeffe
Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant, there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing.

Georgia O'Keeffe
When I began to paint flowers, I was sure nobody would pay attention. So I thought, I'll make them big and they'll pay attention — one of those good-for-nothing reasons. But they took notice.

Georgia O'Keeffe
I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower, you hung all your associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see—and I don't.

Georgia O'Keeffe
.. About my work Howard – I always have two opinions – one is my way of seeing it for myself – and for myself I am never satisfied – never really – I almost always fail – always I think – now next time I can do it – Maybe that is part of what keeps one working – I can also look at myself – by that I mean my work from the point of view of the looking public – and that is the way I look at it when I think of showing. I have always first had a show for myself – and made up my mind – then after that it doesn't matter to me very much what anyone else say – good or bad.

Georgia O'Keeffe
I see no reason for painting anything that can be put into any other form as well.

Georgia O'Keeffe