Top 139 Quotes & Sayings by Georgia O'Keeffe - Page 3

I am trying with all my skill to do a painting that is all woman, as well as all of me.

When you get so that you can't see, you come to it gradually. And if you didn't come by it gradually, I guess you'd just kill yourself when you couldn't see.

On the way I stood a moment looking out across the marshes with tall cattails, a patch of water, more marsh, then the woods with a few birch trees shining white at the edge on beyond. In the darkness it all looked just like I felt. Wet and swampy and gloomy, very gloomy. In the morning I painted it. My memory of it is that it was probably my best painting that summer.

I believe an artist is the last person in the world who can afford to be affected.

I know I am unreasonable about people but there are so many wonderful people whom I can't take the time to know.

I find that I have painted my life - things happening in my life - without knowing.

I have not worked at all... Nothing seems worth putting down - I seem to have nothing to say - it appalls me but that is the way it is.

I have painted portraits that to me are almost photographic. I remember hesitating to show the paintings, they looked so real to me. But they have passed into the world as abstractions - no one seeing what they are.

It is really so nice here-country-busy-busy with so many different kinds of things-... I must say I feel far away in another world here-... always we go to a new place...the people have a kind of gentleness that isn't usual on the mainland.

I don't really know where I got my artists idea. The scraps of what I remember do not explain to me where it came from. I only know that by this time it was definitely settled in my mind.

Slits in nothingness are not very easy to paint.

Bement was a very good teacher but he was a very poor painter. I guess he wasn't a painter at all. He had no courage and I believe that to create one's own world in any of the arts takes courage.

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.

We feared the heartlessness of human beings, all of whom are born blind, few of whom ever learn to see.

We'd make love. Afterwards he would take photographs of me. (On modeling for Alfred Stieglitz)

I see no reason for painting anything that can be put into any other form as well.

War is killing the individual in it unless he has learned livingness - if he had it he wouldn't be a good soldier.

Objective painting is not good painting unless it is good in the abstract sense.

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.