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Your Quotes for 15 November 2005 - Georgia O'Keeffe

Georgia Totto O'Keeffe was born at Sun Prairie, Wisconsin on this day in 1887. She wanted to pursue a career in art at a very early age, and studied painting at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Students' League at New York, then returned to Chicago and worked in commercial art. She had stopped painting for a while and was teaching school at Amarillo, Texas when she sent some landscape drawings to a friend at New York City. The friend showed them to gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz who, without O'Keeffe's knowledge, staged her first gallery show. She moved to New York, married Stieglitz, and began one of the most successful artistic careers of the last century. O'Keeffe was able to move in close to nature and give us a rich and subtle look at things, particularly flowers, that is both precisely pictorial and abstract.

To create one's world in any of the arts takes courage.

I have been terrified every day of my life, but that has never stopped me from doing everything I wanted to do.

To make your unknown known - that is the important thing.

When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it's your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else. Most people in the city rush around so, they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether they want to or not.

The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without the work.

I hate flowers. I only paint them because they're cheaper than models and they don't move.
     - All from Georgia O'Keeffe, 1887 - 1986

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