Source: Georgia O'Keeffe recorded interview with The Museum of Modern Art (1977). The wording varies slightly between published transcriptions.
I've been absolutely terrified every moment of my life – and I've never let it keep me from doing a single thing that I wanted to do.
Georgia O'Keeffe
We like to imagine great artists as fearless people, creating art and deciding on ideas with complete confidence in every decision they make, but Georgia O'Keeffe had no time for that myth. When she reflected on her life in a recorded interview with The Museum of Modern Art in the 1970s, she admitted she'd been terrified "every moment" of it, adding, “and I've never let it keep me from doing a single thing that I wanted to do”.
That's quite the confession from one of the most influential painters of the 20th century, whose landscape paintings feel sparse and bold, contrasting shapes and colour to draw out emotion from the wide skies of New Mexico. Somehow it makes everything she achieved feel even more impressive, and also gives me confidence that I don’t need to be perfect, that no one needs to be amazing all the time, that I can pick up the best paints or best drawing tablet and just… try something.
What’s inspirational about O'Keeffe is she didn't wait until she felt ready or hold off until the doubts disappeared; instead, she packed up, moved to New Mexico, painted the landscapes that fascinated her, developed a style nobody else was making and ignored plenty of people who insisted her work meant something she'd never intended. Fear was there the whole time; apparently, she just didn’t allow those negative feelings to get in the way.
Creative work has a habit of making us think confidence has to come first, before ideas, work and practice; before you publish the portfolio or sketch the idea, before you hit render or send the pitch, there's that voice asking whether you're good enough – inferiority complex is more common than anyone ever thinks. What’s reassuring here is O'Keeffe's quote flips the order around, so confidence isn't the thing that gets you started but more often it turns up halfway through the journey, if at all, because even the most brilliant artists can lack confidence; they just don’t dwell on it or allow it to hold them back.
If you've been putting off a project because you're waiting to feel certain it’s the right thing, the best idea, this is your reminder that certainty is wildly overrated and you won’t know if an idea is good until you at least give it a go. If we all learn something from O'Keeffe, it’s that we can’t stop feeling afraid, but we can make something before fear talks us out of doing it.
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