Georgia O'Keeffe Quotes

Sometimes I find myself at three o'clock in the morning painting something and throwing things around and seeing what works. I'd like to properly study fine art. I think it would be quite an interesting endeavor.

Painting is a nail to which I fasten my ideas.

If I'm painting, I paint every day. I'll be up in the studio from 8:00 in the morning to 8:00 at night.

Art is that which comes to a man, and stands between himself and an implacable witness: the work.

But I think that's a particular kind of experience involving a certain immediacy between you and the canvass, you and the particular kind of experience of that particular moment.

When I work, I'm thinking in terms of purely visual effects and relations, and any verbal equivalent is something that comes afterwards. But it's inconceivable to me that I could experience things and not have them enter into my painting.

I don't want to be a film-maker. I think painting is far more exciting and profound.

I am pleased to see that information campaigns, such as the America's WETLAND effort, are getting the message out, and people are beginning to realize that wetlands loss in Louisiana affects us all.

Sometimes I write what I can't paint, and I paint what I can't write. I use a different part of the brain.

My wife is a painter, musician, and fiber artist. We married in 1993, and as she worked, I found that my reading about art was helping me understand what she was doing, just as seeing her work gave me a language with which to speak of art.

I'm just a landscape painter. I look out the window and I see what's going on, and I paint it. While I'm painting it, I also write thoughts about what I see going on out there.

The people I feel inspired around draw pictures, they make paintings.

Every piece of writing I've done has been something where I feel like I need to get this out of me, whether it's a seed of something personal or an anxiety that turns into a play or an image that's in my mind and haunts me that I'm trying to investigate.

I sit beside the fire and think of all that I have seen, of meadow-flowers and butterflies in summers that have been; Of yellow leaves and gossamer in autumns that there were, with morning mist and silver sun and wind upon my hair.

I do these records. All of these ideas that I have, that I put out there, that inspire me to write, are a purging in a lot of ways. I have to expel them in order for myself to walk around and actually smile and be a regular, or a living, person.

Painting allows me to use other portions of my brain pleasurably. Irony plays no part in what or how I paint. I paint the particular subject matter not to make polemical points but because I am interested in the human imprint on the landscape. I paint the landscape of my time and place with the stuff in it.

There's always been anger in the making of music or literature or dance.

All I care about these days is painting — photography has never been more than a way into painting, a sort of instant drawing.

The artist’s memory is a dangerous, necessary thing. Never disavow what you see and remember-it’s your brilliant stock-in-trade: remembering, and making something out of it. Artists remember the world as it is, first, because you have to know what it is you’re reinventing; that’s a rule, perhaps the only one: being cognizant of your source material.

In painting, as in the other arts, there's not a single process, no matter how insignificant, which can be reasonably made into a formula. You come to nature with your theories, and she knocks them all flat.

Memories must enter the bloodstream, must churn awhile through the heart's mill, must be crushed and polished, be nearly forgotten or cling like burs to other stories before they spill forth in purple patterns, shapes of small bones and worm rot, shapes of clouds and the spaces between leaves.

I'm a painter, that's where I started out, at four years old, that was my first love as far as expression. So, I'm not a painter in the sense of, "Please come see my paintings" but, I do understand the value of not looking over the artist's shoulder while the work is in progress.

The poems ... are moments when I had the intensity to see, and the energy to build, some careful analog that completed the seeing. ... All I have been left is the exhausting habit of trying to tack up the slack in my life with words.

In the silence of their studios, busied for days at a time with works which leave the mind relatively free, painters become like women; their thoughts can revolve around the minor facts of life and penetrate their hidden meaning.