'Making your unknown known'

Georgia O’Keefe wrote: ’Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant, there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing’. This quote has been running through my mind the past couple of days, for good reason. I finally understand what she means; I’ve understood her words before, but more abstractly. Now I feel the understanding and embrace it personally. Each time I publish a new book, post new photos to this blog, or create short video clips, I am making my unknown known. But I didn’t fully realize until recently that the reason I do these things has more to do with unleashing my creative energy (true success) and less to do with aiming for financial success. Just so I am not misunderstood; if my books, photos or videos can earn some money, I’d be very pleased about that. But it’s not the main reason I create them. It matters more to me that a reader of one of my books or blog posts contacts me to tell me that he or she really liked what I wrote, or that I helped him or her see a situation in a new way. I know that’s true because that has happened in my own life. There are books, albeit very few, that have changed my life for the better. Something about the way they were written, in addition to the time in my life when I read them—a coincidence that led to change. The written word has much power; that has been commented on many times before. But the same has happened to me when I have watched a good film or happened upon a very special song. Doors get unlocked in my mind, and I get to wander through them and into new rooms--wide open spaces waiting to be filled with new experiences. The creative world is a world that I simply could not live without; it is true freedom that no one can take from you. Now that I live in it, I have no desire to return to a world that wishes to shackle me. The desire to shackle may not be intentional, but whenever the unappeasable demands of others, e.g. in the workplace, supersede my own wishes, I feel shackled. Whenever someone or something wants to waste my precious time, I feel shackled. When you finally realize how precious time is, and how short life is, you don’t want to squander it on activities or people that give you nothing in return.

Socrates wrote: ‘The unexamined life is not worth living’. It was important to him that he got in touch with his ‘unknown’; that was his definition of being alive. I agree with him. If you never dig deeper into yourself, you’ll never know what you could create. You’ll never find your talents, and you’ll never make your unknown known. Perhaps that doesn’t bother most people. But I don’t know if I believe that. I wonder sometimes if most of us just never find the time, or make the time, to make it happen. Time passes by, and suddenly a lifetime does too. Suddenly I am reminded of Horace’s quote: ‘Carpe diem (seize the day)’. There’s no time like the present to get started…….

What Georgia O’Keeffe Said

Georgia O'Keeffe was born in 1887 near Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. She is one of America's most important modern artists, well-known for her bold, beautiful and colorful flower paintings. She had some important things to say about art, courage, being an artist and being a woman. She died in Santa Fe, New Mexico, an area of the USA that she loved, in 1986.

·         Making your unknown known is the important thing.

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

·         Where I was born and where and how I have lived is unimportant. It is what I have done with where I have been that should be of interest.

·         I said to myself, I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me -- shapes and ideas so near to me -- so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn't occurred to me to put them down. I decided to start anew, to strip away what I had been taught.

·         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.

·         I decided that if I could paint that flower in a huge scale, you could not ignore its beauty.

·         I'll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking the time to look at it – I will make even busy New Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers.

·         I think I am one of the few who gives our country any voice of its own.

·         One cannot be an American by going about saying that one is an American. It is necessary to feel America, like America, love America and then work.

·         One can't paint New York as it is, but rather as it is felt.

·         Now and then when I get an idea for a picture, I think, how ordinary. Why paint that old rock? Why not go for a walk instead? But then I realize that to someone else it may not seem so ordinary.

·         I found I could say things with colors that I couldn't say in any other way -- things that I had no words for.

·         I don't see why we ever think of what others think of what we do -- no matter who they are. Isn't it enough just to express yourself?

·         I feel there is something unexplored about women that only a woman can explore.

·         I've been absolutely terrified every moment of my life -- and I've never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do.

·         The days you work are the best days.

·         You get whatever accomplishment you are willing to declare.