Georgia O'Keeffe - Bones Quotes

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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
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 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
Alfred [Stieglitz] was always apprehensive about my new things. When I started painting big flowers he said, 'Well, what do you think you are going to do with that?' He was always nervous until the first notices came in. When I brought back my bones from New Mexico and began to work on them he had a fit.

Georgia O'Keeffe
When I came to New Mexico in the summer of 1929, I was so crazy about the country that I thought, how can I take part of it with me to work on? There was nothing to see in the land in the way of a flower. There were just dry white bones. So I picked them up.... I took back a barrel of bones to New York.

Georgia O'Keeffe
The bones seem to cut sharply to the center of something that is keenly alive on the desert even though it is vast and empty and untouchable — and knows no kindness with all its beauty.

Georgia O'Keeffe
I have frozen in the mountains in rain and in hail – and slept out under the stars – and cooked and burned on the desert so that riding through Kansas on the train when everyone is wilting about me seems nothing at all for heat – my nose has peeled and all my bones have been sore from riding – I drove with friends through Arizona – Utah – Colorado – New Mexico till the thought of a wheel under me makes me want to hold my head.

Georgia O'Keeffe