Georgia O'Keeffe Quotes
-
I long ago came to the conclusion that even if I could put down accurately the thing I saw and enjoyed, it would not give the observer the kind of feeling it gave me. I had to create an equivalent for what I felt about what I was looking at-not copy it.
→ -
Before I put brush to canvas, I question, 'Is this mine? ...Is it influenced by some idea which I have acquired from some man? ...I am trying with all my skill to do a painting that is all of women, as well as all of me.
→ -
If only people were trees… I might like them better.
→ -
I got half-a-dozen paintings from that shattered plate.
→ -
One can not be an American by going about saying that one is an American. It is necessary to feel America, like America, love America and then work.
→ -
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 tree. It is lines and colors put together so that they may say something.
→ -
Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant, there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing.
→ -
I don't know what Art is but I know some things it isn't when I see them.
→ -
I realized that were I to paint flowers small, no one would look at them because I was unknown. So I thought I'll make them big, like the huge buildings going up. People will be startled; they'll have to look at them - and they did.
→ -
Singing has always seemed to me the most perfect means of expression.
→ -
God told me if I painted that mountain enough, I could have it.
→ -
The men liked to put me down as the best woman painter. I think I'm one of the best painters.
→ -
If one could only reproduce nature, and always with less beauty than the original, why paint at all?
→ -
You write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower - and I don't.
→ -
My painting is what I have to give back to the world for what the world gives to me.
→ -
I'm glad I want everything in the world - good and bad - bitter and sweet - I want it all.
→ -
It's not enough to be nice in life. You've got to have nerve.
→ -
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.
→ -
Color is one of the great things in the world that makes life worth living to me and as I have come to think of painting it is my efforts to create an equivalent with paint color for the world, life as I see it.
→ -
We feared the heartlessness of human beings, all of whom are born blind, few of whom ever learn to see.
→ -
The painting is like a thread that runs through all the reasons for all the other things that make one's life.
→ -
That nervous energy that makes people like you and I want and go after everything in the world - bump our heads on all the hard walls and scratch our hands on all the briars - but it makes living great - doesn't it - I'm glad I want everything in the world - good and bad - bitter and sweet - I want it all and a lot of it too
→ -
I believe an artist is the last person in the world who can afford to be affected.
→ -
I can't live where I want to, I can't go where I want to go, I can't do what I want to, I can't even say what I want to. I decided I was a very stupid fool not to at least paint as I wanted to.
→ -
Sometimes I start in a very realistic fashion, and as I go on from one painting to another of the same kind, it becomes simplified until it can be nothing but abstraction.
→ -
I decided to accept as true my own thinking.
→ -
I feel there is something unexplored about woman that only a woman can explore.
→ -
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.
→ -
Making your unknown known is the important thing - and keeping the unknown always beyond you - catching - crystalizing your simpler clearer vision of life - only to see it turn stale compared to what you vaguely feel ahead - that you must always keep working to grasp.
→ -
I never knew [Alfred Stieglitz] to make a trip anywhere to photograph. His eye was in him, and he used it on anything that was nearby. Maybe that way he was always photographing himself.
→
Related Authors
-
Edward Hopper Painter -
Winslow Homer Illustrator -
Vincent Van Gogh Painter -
Frida Kahlo Painter -
John Singer Sargent Artist -
Ansel Adams Photographer -
Pablo Picasso Painter -
Camille Pissarro Painter -
Edgar Degas Artist -
Edward Ruscha Artist -
Andy Warhol Artist -
Cy Twombly Painter -
Claude Monet Painter -
Gustav Klimt Painter -
Jackson Pollock Artist -
Yayoi Kusama Artist -
Henri Matisse Artist -
Alfred Stieglitz Photographer -
Mary Cassatt Artist -
Arthur Dove Artist