It always seems to me that so few people live — they just seem to exist

The Letters of Georgia O'Keeffe

American artist Georgia O'Keeffe at her home in New Mexico, 1971. (Photo by Basil Langton/Photo Researchers History/Getty Images)

Exactly 135 years ago, in the town of Sun Prairie in Wisconsin, the world was introduced to Georgia Totto O’Keeffe, a dairy farmer’s daughter who would grow up to become an artist of immeasurable influence thanks to her distinctive paintings of flowers, skulls and remote landscapes. Such an anniversary can mean only one thing: I’ve plucked some favourite passages from her dash-laden letters to whet your appetite. The briefest of starters. Should you want more, beneath it all can be found a list of books, mainly, from which these excerpts have been pulled. Seek them out.

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I am too busy being valiant to be able to be interviewed.

Georgia O’Keeffe
Letter to Marjorie Michael
25th August 1975

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You and I don’t know whether our vision is clear in relation to our time or not — No matter what failure or success we may have — we will not know — But we can keep our integrity — according to our own sense of balance with the world and that creates our form — What others have called form has nothing to do with our form — I want to create my own and I can’t do anything else — if I stop to think of what others — authorities or the public — or anyone — would say of my form I’d not be able to do anything.

I can never show what I am working on without being stopped — whether it is liked or disliked I am affected in the same way — sort of paralyzed

Georgia O’Keeffe
Letter to Sherwood Anderson
1st August 1923

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Does it tell you how wildly hungry every inch of me is for you — even my toes — It’s no use to say it’s my soul crying for you — I know good and well that it is my body — my blood — my flesh — even my bones seem to cry for you — hunger for you

Georgia O’Keeffe
Letter to Alfred Stieglitz
16th May 1922