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| Banana Flower, 1934 |
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'I'll tell you how I happened to make the blown-up flowers. In the twenties, huge buildings sometimes seemed to be going up overnight in New York. At that time I saw a painting by Fantin-Latour, a still-life with flowers I found very beautiful, but I realized that were I to paint the same flowers so small, no one would look at them because I was unknown. So I thought I'll make them big like the huge buildings going up. People will be startled; they'll have to look at them - and they did.'
Georgia O'Keeffe interviewed by Katherine Kuh in The Artist's Voice, 1960 |
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| White Flower, 1929 |
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| Jimson Weed, 1936-37 |
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'Dear Mr. Milliken, I have been hoping that you would forget that you asked me to write you of the White Flower, but I see that you do not.
It is easier for me to paint it than to write about it and I would so much rather people would look at it than read about it. I see no reason for painting anything that can be put into any other form as well.
At the time I made this painting, outside my door that opened on a wide stretch of desert these flowers bloomed all summer in the daytime.
The large White Flower with the golden heart is something I have to say about White - quite different from what White has been meaning to me. Whether the flower or the color is the focus I do not know. I do know that this flower is painted large to convey to you my experience of the flower and what is my experience of the flower if it is not color.
I know I can not paint a flower. I can not paint the sun on the desert on a bright summer morning but maybe in terms of paint color I can convey to you my experience of the flower or the experience that makes the flower of significance to me at that particular time.
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 efforts to create an equivalent with paint color for the world - life as I see it'
A Letter to William M. Milliken (Director, Cleveland Art Museum )1 November 1930
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| Cottonwood #III , 1944 |
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'Anita? What is Art - anyway?
When I think about how hopelessly unable I am to answer that question I cannot feeling like a farce - pretending to teach anybody anything about it. I won't be able to keep at it long Anita, or I'll lose what little self respect I have, unless I can in some way solve the problem a little, give myself some little answer to it. What are we trying to do? what is the excuse for it all? If you could sit down and do just exactly what you wanted to right now for a year? what in the dickens would you do? The things I have done that satisfy me most are charcoal landscapes .....I am really quite enjoying the muddle and am wondering if I'll get anything out of it and if I do what it will be, I decided I wasn't going to cater to what anyone else might like; why should I? and when you leave that element out of your work there is nothing much left
A letter to Anita Pollitzer, 20th October 1915 |
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| Bear Lake, 1930 |
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'...whether you succeed or not is irrelevant.There is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing and keeping the unknown always beyond you, catching crystalizing your simpler clearer version of life - only to see it turn stale compared to what you vaguely feel ahead, that you must always keep working to grasp. The form must take care of its self if you can keep your vision clear. I some way feel that everyone is born with it clear but that with most of humanity it become blasted one way or another.
I can never show what I am working on without being stopped. Whether it is liked or disliked I am affected in the same way - sort of paralyzed.'
A letter to Sherwood Anderson (a writer), September, 1923 |
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