Art & Creativity Quote by Georgia O'Keeffe

A perfect deadpan dismantling of the myth that flowers are O'Keeffe's soft, feminine refuge. "I hate flowers" lands like a thrown stone at the feet of everyone who tried to domesticate her work into prettiness. Then she undercuts her own provocation with a brutally practical punchline: flowers are "cheaper than models and they don't move". The line reads like studio logistics, but its real target is the romantic story we demand from artists - especially women artists.

The intent is partly self-defense. O'Keeffe spent decades being reduced to a single subject and a single reading: flowers as coded erotic confession. By framing them as an economic and physical convenience, she refuses the psychoanalytic circus. She shifts the conversation from what flowers "mean" to what painting requires: time, control, repetition, the ability to pin down a form long enough to interrogate it. "They don't move" is a technical note and a power note. In an industry where the female body was the default object, she chooses an object that can't talk back, pose differently, or trigger the usual gaze politics. She controls the encounter.

Context matters: early 20th-century modernism loved to market artists as personalities, and O'Keeffe was packaged aggressively by critics and by Stieglitz's circle. This quip is her counter-marketing campaign in miniature. It's funny because it's true, and it's sharp because it refuses to perform gratitude for the attention. Under the joke sits a credo: painting isn't confession; it's work.