ABOUT PAINTING DESERT BONES (1944)

I have wanted to paint the desert, and I haven't known how. I always think that I can not stay with it long enough. So I brought home the bleached bones as my symbol of the desert. To me they are as beautiful as anything I know. To me they are strangely more living than the animals walking around -- hair, eyes, and all their tails switching. The bones seem to cut sharply to the center of something that is keenly alive on the desert even tho' it is vast and empty and untouchable -- and knows no kindness with all its beauty.

ON THE WIDENESS AND WONDER OF THE WORLD (1939)

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 like.

When I found the beautiful white bones in the desert I picked them up and took them home too.

I have used these things to say what is to me the wideness and wonder of the world as I live in it.

ON SAYING WHAT SHE WANTED TO (1923)

I grew up pretty much as everybody grows up and one day seven years ago found myself saying to myself -- I can't live where I want to -- I can't even say what I want to -- Schools and things that painters have taught me even keep me from painting as I want to. I decided I was a very stupid fool not to at least paint as I wanted to and say what I wanted to when I painted, as that seemed to be the only thing I could do that didn't concern anybody but myself -- that was nobody's business but my own....I found that I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say in any other way -- things that I had no words for.

"I'm going to be an artist!" was Georgia O'Keeffe's answer at age thirteen when asked what she was going to be when she grew up. By the time she was twenty-nine, O'Keeffe (as she was always known in the art world) had her first exhibit in New York, arranged without her knowledge by the artist and gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz, whom she later married. Though she found inspiration in the cityscapes of New York City, she longed for wide open spaces and found them first in northern Texas and later in New Mexico, where she lived and painted for many years.

Additional reading:
Sacred Voices: Essential Women's Wisdom Through the Ages, edited by Mary Ford-Grabowsky
(San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2002).

Reprinted here with the kind permission of Mary Ford-Grabowsky.