This phrase carries quiet power; like a stone placed just so on a sunlit windowsill or a single brushstroke on bare canvas. Georgia O’Keeffe lived by this principle, though she first learned it from Arthur Wesley Dow, her teacher who saw art not as imitation but as harmony – the delicate balance of line, space, and color.
Dow taught composition rather than copying. His lessons emphasized how emptiness could hold meaning equal to form. O’Keeffe felt this deeply, later phrasing it in her own words: “Fill a space in a beautiful way” – a philosophy that guided both her art and her life.
The Art of Space
Consider her paintings. Enlarged blossoms floating in void; weather-bleached bones against endless sky… each composition breathing through its deliberate emptiness. What she excluded mattered as much as what she included.
She applied this same discipline to her New Mexico homes. The spare interiors – adobe walls, wooden beams, a single ceramic bowl catching light – mirrored her artistic vision. Nothing extraneous, nothing wasted. Rooms were composed like canvases, with space treated as an essential element, not an absence to fill.
This concept extends beyond art and décor – it reaches into the very fabric of how we move through the world. Some fill space with noise, haste, or demands for attention; others, like O’Keeffe – who composed her paintings with deliberate forms and meaningful empty space – approached life with similar intentionality, creating impact not through excess, but through the still power of thoughtful, focused presence.
Learn more at The Georgia O’Keefe Museum.
The Woman Who Held the Room
Imagine entering a crowded gathering. Conversations mingle in competing fragments. An older woman enters – moving deliberately, not from frailty but from having nowhere urgent to be. When she sits, she settles completely, as if the chair had been waiting for her arrival.
She doesn’t raise her voice among the din. When spoken to, she turns her whole body toward the speaker, hands resting in her lap. Her simple, “Tell me more about that,” creates a pocket of calm. Without effort, she recalibrates the space. The noise softens. People begin leaning in rather than talking over one another.
Later, when asked about her secret, she smiles. “It’s not about saying the right thing,” she explains. “It’s about leaving room for the right thing to happen.”
This is the essence of filling space beautifully – not commanding attention but giving it, generously and unhurriedly, making the room feel lighter and more expansive through presence alone.
Composition of a Life
It is a profound truth that our lives, like art, are shaped both by what we include and what we exclude. O’Keeffe’s paintings demonstrate beauty through subtraction. The woman’s presence revealed grace in the spaces between words.
In our cluttered world of constant more – more noise, more stuff, more hurry – there’s a subtle revolution in doing less, but doing it with full attention. It manifests in how we design a garden, and equally in how we listen to a friend or enter a room – not to claim space, but to honor it.
To fill space beautifully isn’t about decoration. It’s about attention – knowing what to place and what to leave vacant. It’s restraint, clarity, and the courage to let emptiness speak.
O’Keeffe once described communicating through color and form when language failed. “I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way – things I had no words for.” The same applies to how we move through our days. The way we sit at a table, pause before responding, allow light to fall between us – these too are ways of filling space beautifully.
The Unseen Brushstrokes
In a world that values fullness – full schedules, full inboxes, full homes – there’s wisdom in O’Keeffe’s approach. Sometimes the most beautiful way to fill a space is to preserve its openness, to let it breathe.
What does the space around you say when you aren’t speaking?
Think of the difference between someone who bursts into a meeting, scattering papers and frenetic energy and one who enters with composed focus.
Or consider an exchange in which one person, while the other speaks, plans her next point, and compare it to someone who actively listens.
How might you fill one corner of your world more beautifully by attending to what already belongs there? By listening beyond what is said, to what wants to be expressed when the noise falls away?
This is how the desert speaks: through letting the wind carve its name in slow syllables. What we name emptiness is fullness in disguise – it is the shape around which all meaning gathers, the silence between the notes that calls the melody into song.
Also read, For Beauty’s Sake: A Lighthouse Keeper’s Tale.
Let’s Reflect:
What does the space around you say when you aren’t speaking? How would people describe you? Do you fill a room in a beautiful, calming way?
