An Inspiring Art Book

I am breaking the mold of "100 words or less" to post an Remarkable Women Artists project for my students' art class. 

All quotes from Georgia O’Keeffe, Nature and Abstraction published by the Irish Museum of Modern Art and Vancouver Art Gallery.

Early Work

From the Lake

 New York City Influences

Radiator Building, Night, New York, 1927

The West—Later Years

 book about her New Mexico years

Quotes, Inspiration, Paintings

“Abstraction is often the most definite form for the intangible thing in myself that I can only clarify in paint… I found I could say things in color and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way—things I had no words for.”

“I had been taught to work like others and after careful thinking I decided that I wasn’t going to spend my life doing what had already been done…I decided to start anew—to strip away what I had been taught—to accept as true my own thinking”

About Flower Abstraction—her major early series of flower paintings: “I’m going to paint it big so they will have to look at it…it just amused me, the idea of getting them to see what I saw.”

“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 effort to create an equivalent of paint color for the world—life as I see it.”

Life in the West, 1929

“I never feel at home in the East like I do out here—and finally feeling in the right place again…It is just unbelievable—one perfect day after another.”

1955 Green Patio Door

On painting abstraction from nature

“A hill or tree cannot make a good painting just because it is a hill or a tree. It is lines and color put together so that they say something. For me that is the very basis of painting. The abstraction is often the most definite form for the intangible thing in myself that I can only clarify in paint.”

Black Mesa Landscape, 1930

“The unexplained thing in nature that makes me feel the world is big far beyond my understanding—to understand maybe by trying to put it into form. To find the feeling of infinity on the horizon line or over the next hill.”

Ram's Head and White Hollyhock Hills, New Mexico

Finding Inspiration in the World Around Her, In Objects: 

“I have picked flowers where I found them—have picked up sea shells and rocks and pieces of wood where there were sea shells and rocks and pieces of wood that I liked…I have used these things to say what is to me the wideness and wonder of the world as I live in it.”