Georgia O'Keeffe Quotes

If you are a writer or any kind of artist, if you change something as fundamental as where you live - the way you live - then I think you change the very instrument that is trying to make the art.

I have found in my still-life work that I seem to be able to tell what objects are important to me by what tends to stay in the painting as it develops.

Dawn is about luminosity and so is the iPhone... The little drawings of the dawn are done while I'm still in bed... If you're in my kind of business you'd be a fool to sleep through that... Artists can't work office hours, can they?

Painters paint outdoors, or in rooms full of people; they paint their lovers, alone, naked; they paint and eat; they paint and listen to the radio. It is a soothing way of doing your job.

So much of every art is an expression of the subconscious that it seems to me most of all the important qualities are put there unconsciously, and little of importance by the conscious intellect. But these are things for the psychologist to untangle.

Don't think. The worst songs I've ever written happen when I think.

Artistic inspiration ignores the law of supply and demand.

A lot of artists are involved with fabrication. Artists today are making more objects and many of them need the participation of a dealer in order to facilitate and provide support for projects. So that has changed. But I don't know if what it means to be an artist has really changed. I hope that it hasn't.

I have an idea of a set of colors and see what I have. A lot of things, the best, more magical things in the paintings just sort of happen. They aren't things I thought of in advance. They are more things I am given. What paint does, in watercolor more than oil but it happens in oil too, are things one never expects if you work freely. I suppose I learned a lot coming to this after years of playing improvisational music. I have to trust my intuition and I work in the moment, when that moment seems to be happening. And to leave it alone when it is not.

Writing, for me, is a little like wood carving. You find the lump of tree (the big central theme that gets you started), and you start cutting the shape that you think you want it to be. But you find, if you do it right, that the wood has a grain of its own (characters develop and present new insights, concentrated thinking about the story opens new avenues). If you're sensible, you work with the grain and, if you come across a knot hole, you incorporate that into the design. This is not the same as 'making it up as you go along'; it's a very careful process of control.

Art does not come from thinking but from responding.

You take a painting, you have a white, virginal piece of canvas that is the world of purity, and then you put your imagery on it, and you try to bring it back to the original purity.

If there is no mystery, for the artist, to solve inside of his art, then there's no point in it....for me, every act of the art of solving a mystery.

The only damn thing I ever learned in all my years in art school was a piece is never done, it is just finished. You have to trust your inner voice, your instincts, when they tell you pencils down. And you roll up your sleeves and you start over again.

When I photograph someone, I want to shoot the subject and get them out of my studio so I can play with the photos and do all the stuff I want.

I have so much music that I do. Just like how a visual artist is always sketching something but they might not share it, I'm always writing songs or coming up with melodic lines on piano or guitar. It's therapy. It's always happening.

The new Galliano will be even bigger and better... I love working, it's my therapy. I can draw until four in the morning every night and not feel tired... I've come face to face with my demons, medicine and alcohol. I have rebuilt myself again.

How certain human beings are able to create works of art is a mystery, and why they should wish to do so, at a great cost to themselves usually, is another mystery. Works are not created by one's life; every life is rich in material.

What's any artist, but the dregs of his work? the human shambles that follows it around. What's left of the man when the work's done but a shambles of apology.

Maybe the given person, cup, or landscape is lost before one gets to painting. A figure exerts a continuing and unspecified influence on a painting as the canvas develops. The represented forms are loaded with psychological feeling. It can't ever just be painting.

When an artist explains what he is doing, he usually has to do one of two things: either scrap what he has explained, or make his work fit in with the explanation.

An artist needs a certain amount of turmoil and confusion.

Think of a fine painter attempting to capture an inner vision, beginning with one corner of the canvas, painting what she thinks should be there, not quite pulling it off, covering it over with white paint, and trying again, each time finding out what her painting isn't, until she finally finds out what it is. And when you finally do find out what one corner of your vision is; you're off and running.

I like the idea of seeing a film that has the artist's hand in there,a film where you can see his strokes, you can see his working patterns. It's like going to a museum and seeing a Renoir drawing. You want to see their work and you want to see how they put it together. For me to see that in animation is really fresh, it's really exciting, it's really original.

Great imaginations are apt to work from hints and suggestions, and a single moment of emotion is sometimes sufficient to create a masterpiece.