Georgia O'Keeffe quotes - page 4
Dear Anita [ w:Anita Pollitzer ], don't forget w:Mary Cassatt [as one of her inspirations] - and I am not sure that your new paragraph will hold water [(Anita had sent her a chapter of the biography she was writing about Georgia] - We [artists] probably all derive from something - with some it is more obvious than with others - so much so that we can not escape a language of line that has been growing in meaning since the beginning of lines.
Georgia O'Keeffe
I have been thinking of what you say about form... I feel that a real living form is the natural result of the individual's effort to create the living thing out of the adventure of his spirit into the unknown.... and from that experience comes the desire to make the unknown known. By unknown I mean the thing that means so much to the person that he want to put it down - clarify something he feels but does not clearly understand... Making the unknown known.... if you stop to think of form as form you are lost.
Georgia O'Keeffe
There are people who have made me see shapes - and others I thought of a great deal, even people I have loved, who make me see nothing. I have painted portraits that to me are almost photographic. I remember hesitating to show the paintings, they looked so real to me. But they have passed into the world as abstractions - no one seeing what they are.
Georgia O'Keeffe
Later I had two green ones [alligator pears] - not so perfect. I painted them several times [c. 1920] when the men [American modernist artists, a. o. Marsden Hartley ] didn't think much of what I was doing. They were all discussing Paul Cézanne, with long involved remarks about the 'plastic quality' of his form and colour. I was an outsider. My colour and form were not acceptable. It had nothing to do with Cézanne or anything else. I didn't understand what they were talking about why one colour was better than another... Years later when I finally got to Cézanne's Mont Sainte-Victoire in the south of France, I remember sitting there thinking, 'How could they attach all those analytical remarks to anything he did with that mountain?
Georgia O'Keeffe
