About Georgia O'Keeffe: Georgia Totto O'Keeffe is best known for her paintings of enlarged flowers, New York skyscrapers, and New Mexico landscapes. O'Keeffe has been recognized as the "Mother of American modernism".
I often painted fragments of things because it seemed to make my statement as well as or better than the whole could.
I said to myself, 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.
One can't paint New York as it is, but rather as it is felt.
I don't very much enjoy looking at paintings in general. I know too much about them. I take them apart.
I have things in my head that are not like what anyone taught me — shapes and ideas so near to me,so natural to my way of being and thinking.
It's not enough to be nice in life. You've got to have nerve.
I have already settled it for myself so flattery and criticism go down the same drain and I am quite free.
I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way... things I had no words for.
My first memory is of light -- the brightness of light -- light all around.
Nothing is less real than realism. Details are confusing. It is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis, that we get at the real meaning of things.
Someone else's vision will never be as good as your own vision of your self. Live and die with it 'cause in the end it’s all you have. Lose it and you lose yourself and everything else. I should have listened to myself.
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.
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. Most people in the city rush around so, they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether they wa...
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.
It was all so far away - there was quiet and an untouched feel to the country and I could work as I pleased.
I feel there is something unexplored about woman that only a woman can explore.
