Georgia On Our Mind

Image borrowed from Yahoo

It's the birthday of Georgia O'Keeffe, born in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin (1887), who was an unknown 29-year-old art teacher when a series of her charcoal drawings wound up in the hands of the photographer and art promoter Alfred Stieglitz, and he put the drawings in his art gallery on Fifth Avenue in New York City without even asking her. At first, she was angry that her work had been exhibited without her permission, but the drawings made her famous, the first American woman to be taken seriously by the art world.

She eventually met Stieglitz; they hit it off and got married. O'Keeffe eventually became even more famous for her paintings of flowers, but when asked why she chose flowers as her subject, she said, "Because they're cheaper than models and they don't move."

Anyone who doesn't feel the crosses simply doesn't get that country.
Georgia O'Keeffe

I believe I would rather have Stieglitz like something - anything I had done - than anyone else I know.
Georgia O'Keeffe

I decided that if I could paint that flower in a huge scale, you could not ignore its beauty.
Georgia O'Keeffe

I decided to start anew, to strip away what I had been taught.
Georgia 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

I feel there is something unexplored about woman that only a woman can explore.
Georgia O'Keeffe

I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way - things I had no words for.
Georgia O'Keeffe

I had to create an equivalent for what I felt about what I was looking at - not copy it.
Georgia O'Keeffe

I hate flowers - I paint them because they're cheaper than models and they don't move.
Georgia O'Keeffe

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.
Georgia O'Keeffe

I know now that most people are so closely concerned with themselves that they are not aware of their own individuality, I can see myself, and it has helped me to say what I want to say in paint.
Georgia O'Keeffe

I often lay on that bench looking up into the tree, past the trunk and up into the branches. It was particularly fine at night with the stars above the tree.
Georgia O'Keeffe

I often painted fragments of things because it seemed to make my statement as well as or better than the whole could.
Georgia O'Keeffe

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.
Georgia O'Keeffe

I've been absolutely terrified every moment of my life - and I've never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do.
Georgia O'Keeffe

It was all so far away - there was quiet and an untouched feel to the country and I could work as I pleased.
Georgia O'Keeffe

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

Marks on paper are free - free speech - press - pictures all go together I suppose.
Georgia O'Keeffe

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.
Georgia O'Keeffe

One can not be an American by going about saying that one is an American. It is necessary to feel America, like America, love America and then work.
Georgia O'Keeffe

Thanks to Garrison Keillor, for his reminder, over on the Writer's Almanac