Georgia OKeeffe Quotes - Page 4

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 colour 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.

I'd been taught to paint like other people, and I thought, what's the use? I couldn't do any better than they, or even as well. I was just adding to the brushpile. So I quit.

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.

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.

The simple fact of yourself... there it is... just you... no excitement about it... a very simple fact... the only thing you have... keep it as clear as you can.

It seems to be my mission in life to wait on a dog.

The clean clear colours were in my head. But one day as I looked at the brown burned wood of the Shanty, I thought 'I can paint one of those dismal-coloured paintings like the men. I think just for fun I will try - all low-toned and dreary with the tree besides the door.' In my next show, 'The Shanty' went up. The men seemed to approve of it. They seemed to think that maybe I was beginning to paint. That was my only low-toned dismal-coloured painting.

There is something so perfect about the mountains and the lake and the trees... sometimes I want to tear it all to pieces.

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.

I decided to start anew, to strip away what I had been taught.

When I found the beautiful white bones in the desert I picked them up and took them home too...I have used these things to say what is to me the wideness and wonder of the world as I live in it.

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.

Singing has always seemed to me the most perfect means of expression.

I have a single track mind. I work on an idea for a long time. It's like getting acquainted with a person, and I don't get acquainted easily.

The unexplainable thing in nature that makes me feel the world is big fat beyond my understanding – to understand maybe by trying to put it into form. To find the feeling of infinity on the horizon line or just over the next hill.

Now and then when I get an idea for a picture, I think, how ordinary. Why paint that old rock? Why not go for a walk instead? But then I realise that to someone else it may not seem so ordinary.

All the earth colours of the painter's palette are out there in the many miles of badlands.

Singing has always seemed to me the most perfect means of expression. It is so spontaneous. And after singing, I think the violin. Since I cannot sing, I paint.

I decided I was a very stupid fool not to at least paint as I wanted to.

I'm glad I want everything in the world - good and bad - bitter and sweet - I want it all.

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.

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.

Marks on paper are free - free speech - press - pictures all go together I suppose.

Whether the flower or the color is the focus I do not know. I do know the flower is painted large to convey my experience with the flower - and what is my experience if it is not the color?