My Influences - Georgia O'Keeffe
“Someone else’s vision will never be as good as your own vision of yourself. Live and die with it ‘cause in the end, it’s all you have. Lose it and you lose yourself and everything else. I should have listened to myself.
”
Abstraction White Rose, 1927/Georgia O’Keeffe
Many years ago, when I was an undergrad, I took a women's study art history class that featured many wonderful female artists. This is where I remember having an in-depth introduction to Georgia O'Keeffe's work. Little did I realize how heavily she would influence my work in graduate school!
Georgia said, “I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way – things that I had no words for.” This was how I felt! I was a new graduate student, trying to find my subject, while living in San Francisco and I felt lost. When I started photographing flowers I found that I feel the same way about being able to express myself through shapes and color. I found that to be super inspirational! There I was photographing flowers up-close with my macro lens, discovering a distinctly unique world that you would never see when just viewing flowers from a distance.
I could quote Georgia over, and over, and obviously will, but she had so many things to say that just resonate with me toward my work. Talking about a flower she said, “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.”
Each and every time I look into her work and hear her quotes about her work I think, yes, she really knew what she was talking about!
One of the things I learned in studying Georgia O’Keeffe’s large paintings of abstract flowers was that it allowed viewers to look at her subject of flowers in a different way. Each of her paintings gives you a new and intriguing perspective on what a flower can look like when you take a deep look within.
This work has been a huge inspiration to just stop and look closer at what you are choosing to create as an artist. Working through the lens of the camera, and moving back and forth to find just what I want to capture, is not fast work, it is an enjoyable, slow-paced work that takes me into a different world!
Red Canna, 1923/Georgia O’Keeffe
