Georgia OKeeffe Quotes - Page 5

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.

It was all so far away - there was quiet and an untouched feel to the country and I could work as I pleased.

Anyone who doesn't feel the crosses simply doesn't get that country.

There's something about black. You feel hidden away in it.

I don't know what Art is but I know some things it isn't when I see them.

If only people were trees… I might like them better.

I got half-a-dozen paintings from that shattered plate.

He wanted head and hands and arms on a pillow - in many different positions. I was asked to move my hands in many different ways - also my head - and I had to turn this way and that. There were nudes that might have been of several different people - sitting - standing - even standing upon the radiator against the window - that was difficult - radiators don't intend you to stand on top of them. (On being photographed by Alfred Stieglitz)

His letters ... have been like fine cold water when you are terribly thirsty.

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.

The abstraction is often the most definite form for the intangible thing in myself that I can clarify in paint.

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.

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 associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see—and I don't.

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

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.

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

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

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

I find that I have painted my life, things happening in my life - without knowing. After painting the shell and shingle many times, I did a misty landscape of the mountain across the lake, and the mountain became the shape of the shingle - the mountain I saw out my window, the shingle on the table in my room. I did not notice that they were alike for a long time after they were painted.

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.

Did you ever have something to say and feel as if the whole side of the wall wouldn't be big enough to say it on, and then sit down on the floor and try to get it onto a sheet of charcoal paper?

I am not an exponent of expressionism. I don't know exactly what that means, but I don't like the sound of it. I dislike cults and isms. I want to paint in terms of my own thinking and feeling.

Slits in nothingness are not very easy to paint.

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.

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.