Georgia: A Novel of Georgia O'Keeffe

“I know that western sky. Sometimes when I'm alone painting, a blind lifts and I let my mind drift back. I remember walking out into the red sun in Canyon until the night fell. I'd lie down on the scorched hardness of the desert floor, looking up at the stars raining down like small silver bullets into me.

It was all I wanted then – to feel that roar of the infinite that exists within our finite selves. At times it seemed unbearable – that hunger I felt once – like the edges of my skin could not contain it.

I miss that.”
― Dawn Tripp, Georgia: A Novel of Georgia O'Keeffe

“A life is built of lies and magic, illusions bedded down with dreams. And in the end what haunts us most is the recollection of what we failed to see.”
― Dawn Tripp, Georgia: A Novel of Georgia O'Keeffe

“I dip the very tip of my brush into the blue. I want to taste it. I want the thrill of color moving inside me again. The brush floats near the canvas. Where to start? Where to start? A stroke there, but the moment I’ve made it, it’s wrong.”
― Dawn Tripp, Georgia: A Novel of Georgia O'Keeffe

“I BOUGHT THIS house for the door. The house itself was a ruin, but I had to have that door. Over the years, I’ve painted it many times, all different ways: abstract, representational, blue, black, brown. I’ve painted it in the hot green of summer, in the dead of winter, clouds rushing past it, a lone yellow leaf drifting down. I painted the door open only once. Just before he died. In every picture after, it was closed.”
― Dawn Tripp, Georgia: A Novel of Georgia O'Keeffe

“She was seeing something, though. You can see that in her eyes. They are not empty, not flat at all, but filled.”
― Dawn Tripp, Game of Secrets

“It was all I wanted then—to feel that roar of the infinite that exists within our finite selves.”
― Dawn Tripp, Georgia: A Novel of Georgia O'Keeffe

“art is exactly this: making what’s unseen but all around us, visible. Having that sort of faith.”
― Dawn Tripp, Georgia: A Novel of Georgia O'Keeffe

“He did not give me greatness, but his faith in my early work gave me the space to achieve it.”
― Dawn Tripp, Georgia: A Novel of Georgia O'Keeffe

“You have not been overtaught, and most of what you’ve been taught, you’ve rejected, and so the essence of what you are and how you feel comes through in your best work.”
― Dawn Tripp, Georgia: A Novel of Georgia O'Keeffe

“from that moment on art would become this for me—singular, indissoluble—the one thing that could rein in the chaos and fear to transmute an untenable world to some form of beauty even as that world fell away.”
― Dawn Tripp, Georgia: A Novel of Georgia O'Keeffe