Georgia O'Keeffe Quotes

Every painting I do is related to the last one: it may be a continuation of a previous painting or it may be a reaction against it.

I was trying. I was crawling. I was coming into myself. I was trying to in some ways get beyond - what is the word that I'm looking for? - metaphorical language in painting, and to create something that was more indexical. And what I mean by that is that when you go to the library there's an index card that refers to a book that's actual and real in the world. So that index relates to something real.

I often avoid using the terms 'figuration' and 'abstraction' because I've always tried to have it both ways. I want the experience of looking at one of my paintings to be similar to the process of making the painting - you go from the big picture to something very intense and detailed, and then back again.

He drove his kind of realism at me so hard I bounced right into nonobjective painting.

At that point it certainly would be called abstract. That is to say, you had a model and there'd be one or two or three people there drawing the model but otherwise you had abstractions all around the room, even though the model was in front of you.

Painting will have to deal more fully and less obliquely with life and nature's phenomena before it can again become great.

My process is really quite organic, and starting a painting is one of the best parts for me. I always start in quite a loose and free way. I often put down one ground colour to begin with and then play off that.

When I started to do these Pop paintings seriously, I used all these other paintings - the abstract ones - as mats. I was painting in the bedroom, and I put them on the floor so I wouldn't get paint on the floor. They got destroyed.

I like to do really realistic paintings, which requires so much focus; like, if I have to go to the bathroom or change a song, I can't; I'm so in it.

When you start with a portrait and try to find pure form by abstracting more and more, you must end up with an egg.

Sometimes I scrape off a lot. You have on the floor, like cow dung in the field, this big glob of paint... and it's just a lot of inert matter, inert paint. Then I look back at the canvas, and it's not inert - it's active, moving and living.

You just gotta record stuff and move on and make new material. Painters don't wait until they're in some specific gallery before they move on to the next painting.

Every so often, a painter has to destroy painting. Cezanne did it, Picasso did it with Cubism. Then Pollock did it. He busted our idea of a picture all to hell. Then there could be new paintings again.

I have always been concerned with painting that simultaneously insists on a flat surface and then denies it.

To abstract is to draw out the essence of a matter. To abstract in art is to separate certain fundamentals from irrelevant material which surrounds them.

Like commercial stuff is sort of cheap and disposable and fun and can be sort of interesting in many ways. I love being in popular culture and existing in the evolution of popular culture. But it's so different from painting, and it's so different from that sort of slow, contemplative, gradual process that painting is.

My father painted, well into his 80s, what he called hard edge abstractions. It's really cool.

When one starts from a portrait and seeks by successive eliminations to find pure form... one inevitably ends up with an egg.

If a work of art is to explore new environments, it is not to be regarded as a blueprint but rather as a form of action-painting.

The paintings usually start as abstracts and then I look at them and look at them, and like a Rorschach test, I try and see what it is.

There is no interruption between my older paintings and my cutouts. Just that with an increasing sense of the absolute, and more abstraction, I have achieved a form that is simplified to its essence.

With experience it seems to be possible to control the flow of paint, to a great extent, and I don't use - I don't use the accident - 'cause I deny the accident... it's quite different from working, say, from a still life where you set up objects and work directly from them. I do have a general notion of what I'm about and what the results will be. I approach painting in the same sense as one approaches drawing, that is, it's direct.

When I see people making 'abstract' painting, I think it's just a dialogue and a dialogue isn't enough. That is to say, there is you painting and this canvas. I think there has to be a third thing; it has to be a trialogue.

On an instrument you start from one tone. In painting you start from several.

I underwent a whole process of slowly letting go of idiosyncrasies and habits and embellishments and everything extraneous to the essentials that I'm unwilling to let go of. I never dreamed that I would be making black-and-white paintings with so little embellishment. But it's been liberating in many ways to let go of that and yet see what I did want to retain.