Midweek pick-me-up: "To see takes time, like to have a friend takes time." Georgia O'Keeffe on the art of seeing

NOTE: This newsletter might be cut short by your email program. [View it in full](.  If a friend forwarded it to you and you'd like your very own newsletter, [subscribe here]( — it's free.  Need to modify your subscription? You can [change your email address]( or [unsubscribe](. [Brain Pickings]( [Welcome] Hello, {NAME}! This is the Brain Pickings midweek pick-me-up: Once a week, I plunge into my fourteen-year archive and choose something worth resurfacing and resavoring as timeless nourishment for heart, mind, and spirit. (If you don't yet subscribe to the standard Sunday newsletter of new pieces published each week, you can sign up [here]( — it's free.) If you missed last week's edition — kindness over fear: poet Naomi Shihab Nye tells the remarkable real-life story behind her beloved poem "Kindness" — you can catch up [right here](. And if you find any solace, joy, and value in my labor of love, please consider supporting it with a [donation]( – over these fourteen years, I have spent tens of thousands of hours and tremendous resources on Brain Pickings, and every little bit of support helps keep it – keep me – going. If you already donate: THANK YOU. [FROM THE ARCHIVE | Georgia O’Keeffe on the Art of Seeing]( [okeeffe_thepoetryofthings.jpg?fit=254%2C313]( In her stunning autobiographical reflection on [the moment she understood what it means to be an artist]( Virginia Woolf beheld the cosmos of connections in a single flower. Decades later, the Nobel-winning physicist Richard Feynman offered a different, complementary lens on the art of seeing through his now-famous monologue known as [“Ode to a Flower.”]( Before Feynman, before Woolf, another titan of the creative spirit found a powerful metaphor for how we experience the world — how we see it, and how we don’t — in a flower. [GeorgiaOkeeffe_RedCanna_1924.jpg?resize=680%2C823] Georgia O’Keeffe, Red Canna, 1924 (Georgia O’Keeffe Museum) “I found that I could say things with colour and shapes that I couldn’t say in any other way things that I had no words for,” Georgia O’Keeffe (November 15, 1887–March 6, 1986) wrote in the foreword to a catalog for an exhibition of her work two decades before she became the first female artist honored with a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art — a triumph largely predicated on her arresting large-scale paintings of flowers, magnified and abstracted to radiate uncommon emotional intensity haloed by awe. Although art critics consistently insisted that O’Keeffe’s depictions of flowers were her commentary on women’s sexuality, the artist herself resolutely denied these interpretations. For her, they were her commentary on seeing — a magnifying lens for the attention. Painting these close-ups was a way of learning to look, a way of removing the blinders with which we gallop through the world, slowing down, shedding our notions and concepts of things, and taking things in as they really are. [GeorgiaOkeeffe_RufusHolsinger.jpg?resize=680%2C453] Georgia O’Keeffe by Rufus Holsinger, 1915 (Albert & Shirley Small Special Collections Library) In a passage originally published in the exhibition catalog An American Place — which also gave us O’Keeffe’s [serenade to blue]( — and later cited in [Georgia O’Keeffe: The Poetry of Things]( ([public library]( she writes: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]A flower is relatively small. Everyone has many associations with a flower — the idea of flowers. You put out your hand to touch the flower — lean forward to smell it — maybe touch it with your lips almost without thinking — or give it to someone to please them. Still — in a way — nobody sees a flower — really — it is so small — we haven’t time — and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time. If I could paint the flower exactly as I see it no one would see what I see because I would paint it small like the flower is small. So I said to myself — I’ll paint what I see — what the flower is to me but I’ll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking time to look at it — I will make even busy New-Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers. Well — I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower, you hung all your own associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower — and I don’t. [GeorgiaOkeeffe1925.jpg?resize=680%2C1092] Georgia O’Keeffe, Grey Lines with Black, Blue and Yellow, 1923 (Georgia O’Keeffe Museum) Complement with O’Keeffe on [setting priorities]( [success, public opinion, and what it means to be an artist]( and her [passionate love letters]( to Alfred Stieglitz, then revisit cognitive scientist Alexandra Horowitz on [the art of looking]( Annie Dillard on [the secret to seeing]( philosopher Martin Buber on [what a tree can teach us about seeing others as they truly are]( John Ruskin on [how drawing trains you to see more clearly and live with greater presence]( and Emily Dickinson’s [astounding herbarium]( — a forgotten masterpiece of attention at the intersection of poetry and science. [Forward to a friend]( Online]( [Like on Facebook]( donating=loving Every week for fourteen years, I have been pouring tremendous time, thought, love, and resources into Brain Pickings, which remains free and is made possible by patronage. 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You can beam some bit-love my way: 197usDS6AsL9wDKxtGM6xaWjmR5ejgqem7 RELATED READING: [The Art of Looking: Eleven Ways of Viewing the Multiple Realities of Our Everyday Wonderland]( * * * [James {NAME} on the Revelation That Taught Him How to Truly See]( * * * [Thoreau on Knowing vs. Seeing and What It Takes to Apprehend Reality Unblinded by Our Preconceptions]( [---] You're receiving this email because you subscribed on Brain Pickings. This weekly newsletter comes out each Wednesday and offers a highlight from the Brain Pickings archives for a midweek pick-me-up. Brain Pickings NOT A MAILING ADDRESS 159 Pioneer StreetBrooklyn, NY 11231 [Add us to your address book]( [unsubscribe from this list](   [update subscription preferences](