Georgia O'Keeffe
Mother of American modernism
Most quoted
"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 colors put together so that they say something."
— from Letter, 1930
"I said to myself, 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. I decided to start anew, to strip away what I had been taught."
— from Letter, 1915
"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 own associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower – and I don't."
— from Letter, 1939
All quotes by Georgia O'Keeffe (355)
I have always been interested in the way things are becoming.
I have always been interested in the way things are not becoming.
I have always been interested in the way things could become.
I have always been interested in the way things could not become.
I have always been interested in the way things should become.
I have always been interested in the way things should not become.
I have always been interested in the way things might become.
I have always been interested in the way things might not become.
I have always been interested in the way things will become.
I have always been interested in the way things will not become.
Filling a space in a beautiful way. That's what art means to me.
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.
Nobody sees a flower really; it is so small. We haven't time, and to see takes time like to have a friend takes time.
Where I was born and where and how I have lived is unimportant. It is what I have done with where I have been that should be of interest.
To create one's world in any of the arts takes courage.
You get all kinds of people telling you how to do your work, but you have to follow your own feelings.
The abstraction is often the most definite form for the creative vision.
I decided to start from today and forget about the past.
I have but one desire as an artist, that is to give in my own way, undisturbed by any question of boundaries or conventions, what is basic to me.
The bones seem to cut sharply to the center of something that is indispensable to life; the smell of the desert seems to remain on the buckskin.
Contemporaries of Georgia O'Keeffe
Other Visual Artss born within 50 years of Georgia O'Keeffe (1887–1986).