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Female Artist Quotes

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Female Artist Quotes

“Unavoidably and in many cases, sadly, the woman artist must grope her way through the emotional cesspool of her own outrage, her fear, and her anxiety at being treated on the whole as a member of a stereotyped group in society rather than being recognized as an individual. All the problems of the creative lifestyle are doubly difficult and doubly debilitating because as an artist she must first establish herself as a person. Her view of the world, her concern for others, her drive for the tangible creative expressions of the images in her mind are tangled with these negative, frustrating emotions which by their very nature drain her creative powers.”

WomenCreativityFeminismFeministVirginia WoolfWoman ArtistFemale ArtistFemale Creative
Book:Just This Side of Madness: Creativity and the Drive to Create
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“Still, no one much celebrated having found a previously unknown painter [Marie Denise Villers] who was equal to the great David. Though the public continued to love the painting - they may not have known David from Delacroix, at any rate - soma academics had a change of heart about the painting itself. Sterling (see start of chapter) said some not-very nice things, beginning with, "The notion that our portrait may have been painted by a woman is, let us confess, an attractive idea." Why attractive? Because it explains everything wrong with the work: "cleverly concealed weaknesses" and "a thousand subtle artifices" that all add up to "the feminine spirit." In other words: Isn't that just like a woman?”

ArtFeminismArt HistoryFemale ArtistMarie Denise Villers
Book:Broad Strokes: 15 Women Who Made Art and Made History
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“Watanabe-san and Sadie exchanged gifts. She brought him a pair of carved wooden Ichigo chopsticks that their Japanese distributor had had made to celebrate the release of the second Ichigo in Japan. In return, he gave her a silk scarf with a reproduction of Cherry Blossoms at Night, by Katsushika Ōi, on it. The painting depicts a woman composing a poem on a slate in the foreground. The titular cherry blossoms are in the background, all but a few of them in deep shadow. Despite the title, the cherry blossoms are not the subject; it is a painting about the creative process---its solitude and the ways in which an artist, particularly a female one, is expected to disappear. The woman's slate appears to be blank. "I know Hokusai is an inspiration for you," Watanabe-san said. "This is by Hokusai's daughter. Only a handful of her paintings survived, but I think she is even better than the father.”

DaughterGiftsJapaneseChopsticksCherry BlossomsFemale ArtistHokusaiSilk Scarf
Book:Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
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“I turned back to the canvas, and it occurred to me then that only a woman could have made this image. This was not a painting of temptation, but rather one of harassment and intimidation, a scene that could be taking place right now in nearly anyplace in the world. The painting operated around a schism, it represented two irreconcilable subjective positions: the man, who believed the scene to be one of ardor and seduction, and the woman, who had been plunged into a state of fear and humiliation. That schism, I now realized, was the true inconsistency animating the canvas, and the true object of Leyster's gaze.”

PaintingSexual HarassmentFemale ArtistDutch Golden AgeJudith Leyster
Book:Intimacies
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