Georgia O'Keeffe Quotes About Painting

Quotes about: Painting

• Fill a space in a beautiful way.

  Georgia O'Keeffe

  Beautiful, Art, Space

  Georgia O'Keeffe, Jonathan Stuhlman, Barbara Buhler Lynes (2007). “Georgia O'Keeffe: Circling Around Abstraction”, p.15, Hudson Hills

• When people read erotic symbols into my painting, they're really thinking about their own affairs.

  Georgia O'Keeffe

  Thinking, People, Erotic

• 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.

  Georgia O'Keeffe

  Art, Color, Tree

  Britta Benke, Georgia O'Keeffe (2000). “O'Keeffe”

• I don't very much enjoy looking at paintings in general. I know too much about them. I take them apart.

  Georgia O'Keeffe

  Flower, Too Much, Painting

  Dennis Abrams, Georgia O'Keeffe (2009). “Georgia O'Keeffe”, p.9, Infobase Publishing

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

  Georgia O'Keeffe

  Creativity, Acceptance, Half

• 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.

  Georgia O'Keeffe

  Real, Portraits, World

  Georgia O'Keeffe, Barbara Haskell, Museum of Fine Arts (Museum of New Mexico) (1985). “Georgia O'Keeffe, Works on Paper: Museum of Fine Arts, Museum of New Mexico, Santa Fe”, Museum of New Mexico Pr

• 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.

  Georgia O'Keeffe

  Men, Skills, Ideas

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

  Georgia O'Keeffe

  Skills, Trying, Painting

  Georgia O'Keeffe, Bice Curiger, Carter Ratcliff, Peter Johannes Schneemann, Kunsthaus Zürich (2003). “Georgia O'Keeffe”, Cantz

• 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.

  Georgia O'Keeffe

  Art, Flower, Appreciate

• The painting is like a thread that runs through all the reasons for all the other things that make one's life.

  Georgia O'Keeffe

  Running, Painting, Reason

  Katherine Hoffman, Georgia O'Keeffe (1984). “An enduring spirit: the art of Georgia O'Keeffe”, Scarecrow Pr

• My painting is what I have to give back to the world for what the world gives to me.

  Georgia O'Keeffe

  Giving, World, Giving Back

  Jennifer Saville, Georgia O'Keeffe, Honolulu Academy of Arts (1990). “Georgia O'Keeffe: paintings of Hawai'i”

• 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.

  Georgia O'Keeffe

  Fashion, Goes On, Painting

• I realized that I had things in my head not like what I had been taught - not like what I had seen - shapes and ideas so familiar to me that it hadn't occurred to me to put them down. I decided to stop painting, to put away everything I had done, and to start to say the things that were my own.

  Georgia O'Keeffe

  Ideas, Shapes, Taught

  Georgia O'Keeffe, Doris Bry (1988). “Some Memories of Drawings”, Atlantis Editions Book

• In the evening I go up in the desert and spend hours watching the sun go down, just enjoying it, and every day I go out and watch it again. I draw some and there is a little painting and so the days go by.

  Georgia O'Keeffe

  Watches, Desert, Littles

• 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.

  Georgia O'Keeffe

  Lakes, Knowing, Long

  Georgia O'Keeffe (1977). “Georgia O'Keeffe”, Viking Pr

• School and things that painters have taught me even keep me from painting as I want to. I decided I was a very stupid fool not to be at least paint as I wanted to and say what I wanted to when I painted as that seemed to be the only thing I could do that didn't concern anybody but myself. I found that I could say things with colour and shapes that I couldn't say in any other way things that I had no words for.

  Georgia O'Keeffe

  Stupid, School, Shapes

  Foreword to the catalogue for the show at the Anderson Galleries in New York, 1926.

• 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.

  Georgia O'Keeffe

  Summer, Morning, Memories

  "Some Memories of Drawings". Book by Georgia O'Keeffe, 1974.

• Color is one of the great things in the world that makes life worth living to me and as I have come to think of painting it is my efforts to create an equivalent with paint color for the world, life as I see it.

  Georgia O'Keeffe

  Thinking, Color, Effort

  Jennifer Saville, Georgia O'Keeffe, Honolulu Academy of Arts (1990). “Georgia O'Keeffe: paintings of Hawai'i”

• God told me if I painted that mountain enough, I could have it.

  Georgia O'Keeffe

  Artist, Mountain, Painting

• 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.

  Georgia O'Keeffe

  Fun, Men, Thinking

  "Some Memories of Drawings". Book by Georgia O'Keeffe, 1974.

• 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.

  Georgia O'Keeffe

  Beautiful, Men, Blue

  Katherine Hoffman, Georgia O'Keeffe (1984). “An enduring spirit: the art of Georgia O'Keeffe”, Scarecrow Pr

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

  Georgia O'Keeffe

  Painting, Reason, Form

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

  Georgia O'Keeffe

  Painting, Abstract, Objectives

  Georgia O'Keeffe, Jonathan Stuhlman, Barbara Buhler Lynes (2007). “Georgia O'Keeffe: Circling Around Abstraction”, p.26, Hudson Hills

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