Georgia O'Keeffe Quotes

The best reason to paint is that there is no reason to paint... I'd like to pretend that I've never seen anything, never read anything, never heard anything... and then make something... Every time I make something I think about the people who are going to see it and every time I see something, I think about the person who made it... Nothing is important... so everything is important.

Sometimes I see it and then paint it. Other times I paint it and then see it. Both are impure situations, and I prefer neither.

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.

I don't think my work is so strange. It's just a matter of having the discipline to go the whole way with an idea, to stretch it as far as it can go.

Look at the things around you, the immediate world around you. If you are alive, it will mean something to you, and if you care enough about photography, and if you know how to use it, you will want to photograph that meaningness. If you let other people's vision get between the world and your own, you will achieve that extremely common and worthless thing, a pictorial photograph.

A great artist ... takes what he did not make and makes of it something that only he can make.

Some writers' view of things depends upon the success of the final result. I'd rather stand or fall on my own concepts. But there is a fine line to be drawn between pointing up something or distorting it.

It is the function of creative man to perceive and to connect the seemingly unconnected.

Could we teach taste or genius by rules, they would be no longer taste and genius.

Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.

The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity... and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.

Even if you try to copy a film shot by shot, you still can't. It's still your own film.

I make pictures and someone comes in and calls it art.

Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen.

No artist is ahead of his time. He is his time; it is just that others are behind the times.

I search for surprise in my architecture. A work of art should cause the emotion of newness.

In art, theories are as useful as a doctor's prescription; one must be sick to believe them.

Vision is the true creative rhythm.

Painting from nature is not copying the object; it is realizing one's sensations.

I never set out to make a movie that was everything to everybody; if that were the case, we could all just take a picture of a tree and agree that the tree is beautiful and move on with our lives. I wouldn't even need to show up.

The very essence of the creative is its novelty, and hence we have no standard by which to judge it.

Before I do anything, I think, well what hasn't been seen. Sometimes, that turns out to be something ghastly and not fit for society. And sometimes that inspiration becomes something that's really worthwhile.

Art is all a matter of personality.

I always say that I'm at my best when there's no example of what the character is supposed to be. I thrive when there's not much and I have to create it.

From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality.