how to be an artist, according to georgia o’keeffe

picture O'Keeffe for LOOK 1960 by Tony Vaccaro

“The notion that you can make an artist overnight, that there is nothing but genius, and a dash of temperament in artistic success is a fallacy,” American artist Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986) asserted in 1928. The year before, she’d been given her successful first retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum. But O’Keeffe wasn’t done developing as an artist—or contemplating what it meant to be one. “Great artists don’t just happen, any more than writers, or singers, or other creators,” she continued. “They have to be trained, and in the hard school of experience.”
Lesson 1: Observe the world around you—closely, hungrily
Through this process of close looking, O’Keeffe sought to communicate the essence of her surroundings: “It is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis,” she said in 1922, “that we get at the real meaning of things.”
Lesson 2: Organization is key to productivity
She kept her studios, her palette and brushes clean and neat. The palette is on a table she can wheel about—another one is on the window sill—the easel is by the window—another easel is on the window sill. One ten foot table is full of canvas and stretchers and hammers and tacks—then there is a small table full of little pieces of canvas covered cards painted tones of all the colors she has.

Lesson 3: Don’t sweat mistakes—learn from them
She painted the patio door of her New Mexico home more than 20 times. “I have a single-track mind. I work on an idea for a long time,” she told art historian Katharine Kuh. “Success doesn’t come with painting one picture. It results from taking a certain definite line of action and staying with it,” she continued.
Lesson 4: Pay no attention to trends—be yourself
O’Keeffe desired freedom—from artistic trends, from the pressures of the mainstream art world, from the fetters of a male-dominated society. And it was by bucking expectations that she made a unique and revolutionary body of work. “I believe in having everything and doing everything you want,” she once wrote, “if you really want to—and if you can in any possible way.” O’Keeffe lived her dream uncompromisingly and ecstatically.