What Georgia O'Keeffe taught me about singular vision
Georgia O'Keeffe painted flowers for decades.
While other artists pivoted and pivoted, she went deeper and deeper into her singular vision: Flowers, bones, New Mexico landscapes. The same subjects, over and over and over, with more and more clarity each time.
At the time, critics said the flowers were ‘too feminine’ and the desert landscapes were ‘too stark’.
She ignored them and kept painting anyway.
I have loved Georgia for a long time. Austere. Wise Devoted. Entirely of her own.
And the longer I contemplate her work, the clearer it became that her approach offers some really beautiful lessons for anyone building a body of work, a brand or a creative practice today.
So here are two lessons Georgia offers when it comes to your own body of work:
The first is that you truly do not have to do everything everyone else is doing.
I know that it gets confusing with everyone on social telling you what to post, how often, which platforms matter, what converts, what’s over, what’s emerging.
There are strategies that create visibility and there are systems that work. But the moment you begin contorting your work to chase what’s hot right now is often the moment you lose your vision.
And the idea of perpetual responsiveness instead of leadership can often leak into self-abandonment - you are forgoing your own perspective in favour of what you believe you should be talking about instead.
O’Keeffe didn’t orient herself and her work around how it would be received or explain her focus or justify her persistence. She always just simply stayed with what intrigued her.
The second lesson is that you need to pick your subjects and go deep.
Most practitioners or business owners I work with are somewhat scared of being repetitive (and by extension, boring) and so they change their messaging almost weekly. They pivot their offers, they pivot their branding and the only constant is change (and a lack of self-ownership).
Repetition ain't boring when you're going deeper, it actually reveals your depth.
Georgia painted hundreds of flower paintings and each one revealed something new as her vision clarified. Each piece exposed a different relationship to form, colour, scale, subject.
Choosing a limited set of ideas means letting other possibilities go and watching others gain attention through novelty while you stay with something unresolved. And Georgia lived inside that tension for decades, it is what fortified her vision, it is what made her great.
So when we relay these ideas to your brand and your content, this looks like:
01 | Stop diversifying just to appeal to more people and instead go deeper into your 2-3 core themes.
02 | Don’t be afraid to talk about the same thing again and again: your audience actually needs to hear it multiple times before it lands and they even consider working with you.
03 | Stop changing your positioning every time you see someone else's approach. Put your blinders on and trust your vision - it’s yours for a reason.
Georgia once said:
‘I've been absolutely terrified every moment of my life and I've never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do.’
Your singular vision will feel scary at times and potentially too narrow, like you're leaving people out, but that's the whole point. The creatives and the visionaries and the brands who last pick their flowers and they paint them over and over and over again. This means that they keep repeating the same core themes central to their service or their work in everything that they do.
The only service providers I have ever purchased from do exactly that:
A feminine embodiment coach who weaves feminine biological understanding from a GNM lens and into every piece she shares as well as a stance on being a mature woman and holding your centre.
A homeopath who talks about the revolution that medicine needs and how everything begins with energy in the body.
The manifestation teacher who weaves in Traditional Chinese Medicine, beauty and the power of the mind into everything she does.
All of these were subjects that really intrigued me, and each practioner spoke about them with such depth and nuance that over time I began to trust them as an expert and bought from them. I made these purchases 1-3 years ago and these practitioners still talk to the same things in their content. It’s never boring and it still interests me because they continue to go deeper and to master what they know.
So what are your flowers? What are the 2-3 themes you could explore for years without getting bored?
For me, it's:
How narrative shapes reality (the journalism roots)
Creativity, healing and women (the cultural intersection)
Building brand worlds with integrity, not hacking the algorithm (the creative work)
I could talk about these three things for the next decade and never run out of things to say. And that's what having a singular vision is: owning your work and your subjects of intrigue and expertise.
If you’re having trouble figuring out what your flowers could be, start paying attention to:
What you talk about unprompted
What you read about in your free time
What questions clients always ask you
These are your areas of intrigue and expertise and should shape everything that you do. These are the subjects you can start conversations about in your content and the foundations on which you can begin to build your brand world. When people see your posts or your emails or your podcast they will know straight away ‘That is the woman who talks about x’.
So find your flowers and keep coming back to them - that’s your area of devotion and mastery.
