Georgia O'Keeffe
Quotations

"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...So I said to myself - I'll paint what I see - what the flower is to me, but I'll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking time to look at it - I will make even busy New Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers."

 

"I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way - things I had no words for."

 

"After we are through school, I am going to give up everything for my art. I am going to live a different kind of life from the rest of you girls. "

- Spoken when a teenager

 

"...whether you succeed or not is irrelevant -- There is no such thing -- Making your unknown known is the important thing ..."

- In a letter to Sherwood Anderson

 

"I know I can not paint a flower. I can not paint the sun on the desert on a bright summer morning but maybe in terms of paint color I can convey to you my experience of the flower or the experience that makes the flower of significance to me at that particular time. "

 

"In the twenties, huge buildings sometimes seemed to be going up overnight in New York. At that time I saw a painting by Fantin-Latour, a still-life with flowers I found very beautiful, but I realized that were I to paint the same flowers so 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."

- On her huge flowers

 

"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. "

 

"I know now that most people are so closely concerned with themselves that they are not aware of their own individuality… and it has helped me to say what I want to say... in paint."

 

"I always have a curious sort of feeling about some of my things-I hate to show them-I am perfectly inconsistent about it-I am afraid people won’t understand-and I hope they won’t-and am afraid they will. "

 

"It was in the 1920s, when nobody had time to reflect, that I saw a still-life painting with a flower that was perfectly exquisite, but so small you really could not appreciate it."

 

"Well! Well! Well!... This is wonderful. No one told me it was like this! "

- on arriving in New Mexico

 

"My first memory is of the brightness of light... light all around. I was sitting among pillows on a quilt on the ground... very large white pillows... "

 

"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."

 

"I feel there is something unexplored about women that only a woman can explore."

 

"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."