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 know now that most people are so caught up with their lives that they aren't aware of what goes on around them.
When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it's your world for a moment.
I can't live where people sell things to you all day long. I can't live where there are policemen.
The white line is the horizon line. It is the place where the sky and the earth meet.
I have things I don't tell anybody. I have secrets.
Art is a way of expressing what is inside you.
I do not literally paint that table, but the emotion it produces in me.
My paintings are not odes to the vagina, though some people think so.
The desert is strangely beautiful. It is a place of solitude and silence.
I am not an illustrator. I am an artist.
To see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.
I believe that the sight of beauty is good for the soul.
The idea of space is what interests me most in painting.
I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is what I have felt.
Nature is my inspiration, but I transform it.
Silence is the most profound sound.
I work in solitude, but I am not lonely.
The details are not the details. They make the design.
I want to be remembered as a painter who tried to paint the truth.
Life is too short not to paint what you feel.
Contemporaries of Georgia O'Keeffe
Other Visual Artss born within 50 years of Georgia O'Keeffe (1887–1986).