Creativity Quote by Georgia O'Keeffe

O'Keeffe’s line lands like a brushstroke you can’t unsee: blunt, visual, and quietly unforgiving. “Feel the crosses” isn’t about approving of them; it’s about registering their presence as part of the landscape’s emotional weather. In the American Southwest - the “country” O’Keeffe made iconic - crosses are everywhere: roadside memorials, mission architecture, cemetery markers, the residue of Spanish Catholic colonization and the everyday fact of death in a hard, spacious place. She frames them as a sensory requirement, not a theological argument. If you don’t feel them, you’re not merely inattentive; you’re aesthetically and historically illiterate.

The genius is in the verb. “Feel” implies a bodily comprehension that outpaces intellect. O’Keeffe, who spent decades translating New Mexico into distilled forms, understood that landscapes aren’t neutral. They’re layered with belief, violence, solace, and survival - and the cross is a compressed symbol that can hold all of that at once. Her tone carries a kind of gatekeeping, but it’s also a warning against the tourist gaze: the temptation to treat the Southwest as pure color and clean horizon, scrubbed of its grief and its faith.

Contextually, this reads as O’Keeffe defending a way of seeing - one tuned to local symbols rather than imported fantasies. The crosses are not decoration; they’re the country’s punctuation marks, insisting that beauty and mortality share the same light.