On August 1, 1923, Georgia O'Keeffe sat down and wrote to writer Sherwood Anderson a letter that would become one of her most revealing statements about what it means to be an artist: "Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant, there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing, and keeping the unknown always beyond you." O'Keeffe (1887-1986), who would become known as America's first great female artist, was not someone who casually shared her thoughts. Yet through a series of letters exchanged with Anderson during the 1920s, she offered insights into the creative life that have echoed through the decades, preserved in the 1987 book Georgia O'Keeffe: Art and Letters, published the year after her death to commemorate her centennial.

O'Keeffe's correspondence with Anderson arose from genuine creative kinship. Anderson, a celebrated writer, had encountered O'Keeffe's paintings in the early 1920s through her husband, photographer Alfred Stieglitz, a legendary figure in the art world and O'Keeffe's passionate correspondent in thousands of intimate love letters. O'Keeffe's art so moved Anderson that he picked up a paintbrush himself and began painting for the first time. Rather than compete or grow distant, the two developed what O'Keeffe called an "epistolary fellowship," trading letters about their shared beliefs and their friendly disagreements about art. Three years after their exchanges, Anderson would write his own memorable advice on art to his son, likely influenced by the intellectual sparring he had done with O'Keeffe.

In her August 1923 letter, O'Keeffe revealed the careful reasoning behind her artistic approach. She explained that she had wanted to write Anderson for some time but had held back, partly because "I do not like telling myself to people, and writing means that." When she finally read his novel "Many Marriages," she did not rush to send him praise. Instead, she reasoned that opinions about work already completed would be "just so much rubbish, in your way for the clear thing ahead." This philosophy shows O'Keeffe's conviction that an artist's focus must remain on the work yet to come, not on the judgments of others regarding what has already been done. She thought of Anderson often, she wrote, but her thoughts centered not on critique but on a simple, genuine wish: "that the work is going well, that nothing interferes."

Beyond artistic philosophy, O'Keeffe's letters reveal the human side of creative life. She described how, during one difficult spring, her husband Stieglitz had been reduced to "just a little heap of misery, sleepless, with eyes, ears, nose, arm, feet, ankles, intestines, all taking their turn at deviling him." In those dark days, Anderson's letters from afar became an anchor. O'Keeffe wrote that Anderson's correspondence gave Stieglitz comfort and showed him that someone "feels something of what I know he is, that it means much to you in your life." For O'Keeffe herself, his "voice was kind to hear out of faraway" when both she and Stieglitz were feeling "pretty sad and forlorn." She understood, as Virginia Woolf would later call it, the "humane art" of letter writing, the profound gift of one person reaching across distance to touch another's soul.

O'Keeffe's words about artistic integrity and the primacy of the work itself stand in stark contrast to modern creative life. She believed that success or failure was ultimately irrelevant, that an artist's true task was to transform the unknown within themselves into something known through their art, while always maintaining mystery and striving ahead. She guarded her energy and attention fiercely, refusing to waste them on the noise of opinions about finished work. These letters, written in an era before social media and constant public judgment, offer a kind of manifesto for any artist, or indeed, any person trying to do meaningful work. O'Keeffe's insistence that the work itself, and not its reception, was what mattered, became a cornerstone of how she is remembered today.