Free How Georgia Became O'Keeffe by Karen Karbo

in life she would deny she’d had any. She was a magpie. She had a natural habit of absorbing anything and everything that would prove useful to her in her quest to express that for which she had no words, for making her “unknown known.” Her influences were far-reaching and random:
    Alon Bement (a teacher who was a disciple of someone else)
    Wassily Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art (a book)
    Art Nouveau (a craft movement)
    Music (another art form, which she felt was superior to painting)
    The neck of her violin (a common shape)
    The bright white primer the neighbor in the apartment across the way used to prime his own canvases (the fruit of voyeurism)
    Whatever nature thing was currently floating her boat (trees, stones, mountains, sunsets, etc.)
    The thing is not to try to do something brand-new, which is impossible, but to steal the best stuff—defined as that which really speaks to you—then toss it into the VitaMix blender of your consciousness, take a walk (O’Keeffe was a big fan of what she called tramping ), and then come back and have at it.
    And while I’m on the subject of having at it:
    Paint the headache.
    I’m relieved to report that Georgia did not work every blessed day of the Lord. Sometimes you read about these people. They do their thing seven days a week for forty-seven years. They show up in their studio at seven a.m. and don’t leave until midnight, even on Christmas. I’m convinced that the only reason people no longer read Trollope *** is because they hear about how he wrote every morning before he went to work at the post office, and how, if he finished one epic novel during his writing hours, he simply grabbed a new piece of paper and started a new one. His productivity is so off-­putting that we’d rather see what’s going on over at ­gofugyourself.com.
    But Georgia was a proto slacker. She would go through phases when she would work every day, but there were days and weeks when she would read, spend hours tramping around outside, write letters, sew, and play dominoes with the cowboys. When she was at the height of her fame, she spent an inordinate amount of time doing housework, as Stieglitz’s domestic skills were diametrically opposed to his genius for discovering great artists.
    But when Georgia worked, she worked her ass off.
    During her first stint at the Art Students League, when she was a mere babe of twenty, she learned and absorbed a lesson from William Merritt Chase that would serve her well for the length of her long life: Paint a picture a day. The idea was a multifaceted lesson of genius. Painting a picture a day trains you to:

    a) not take your work or yourself too seriously;
    b) capture the energy that led you to paint this particular thing in the first place;
    c) loosen up (you’ve only got a day, so no fussing around);
    d) remember there are more where this one came from (there’s always tomorrow); and
    e) love the process; the enjoyment you had painting that kitten in a basket is more valuable than the painting itself.

    I learned (e) when I took a life drawing class at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles. The only thing I remember about it, aside from the fact that the teacher looked like Tom Petty (to the degree that now, in my memory, the class was taught by Tom Petty), is that at the end of every class, we threw away everything we’d drawn that day. It was mind-blowing. We’d work with gusto for three hours, then cackle like maniacs as we ripped our drawings in two and stuffed them into a garbage can, while Tom Petty sat at the back of the room and chain-smoked. Over beer and pizza after the last class, everyone agreed that this was the best art class they’d ever taken.
    A year later I ran into one of the other students in Tom’s class at—yes—the gift shop at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and he said that Tom Petty had died. That he’d been