Creativity Quote by Georgia O'Keeffe

A clean break can be an aesthetic stance as much as a life choice, and O'Keeffe frames it with the brisk authority of someone who’s done apologizing for her own eye. "Start anew" isn’t the gentle reset of self-help language; it reads like a studio decision: scrape the canvas, clear the palette, rebuild the world from first principles. The more provocative clause is the next one. To "strip away what I had been taught" casts instruction not as nourishment but as accumulation - a film over perception that has to be removed to see sharply again.

In O'Keeffe’s context, that subtext has teeth. She trained in a period when American art education leaned hard on European models, polite realism, and the obedient reproduction of approved subjects. For a woman artist, "what I had been taught" also meant a narrower set of permissions: how big to think, what to paint, how loudly to exist in public. Her career is basically a long argument with those constraints, from the early abstractions that rejected academic rendering to the later, iconic forms that insist a single flower, bone, or horizon can be monumental without narrative alibis.

The line works because it’s both disciplined and defiant. O'Keeffe isn’t romanticizing ignorance; she’s describing a selective unlearning, the deliberate demolition required for an original style. The intent is freedom, but the method is subtraction: fewer inherited rules, more direct seeing.