women-artists

"I willingly accept Cassandra's fate, To speak the truth, although believ'd too late."

"More rich, more noble I will ever hold The Muse's laurel, than a crown of gold."

"We are Diana’s virgin train, Descended of no mortal strain: Our bows and arrows are our goods, Our palaces the lofty woods. * * * If you ask where such wights do dwell, In what blest clime, that so excel, The poets only that can tell."

"The bloody wolf, the wolf does not pursue; The boar, though fierce, his tusk will not embrue In his own kind, Bears, not on bears do prey: Then art thou, man, more savage far than they."

"What ever happy region is thy place, Cease thy celestial song a little space; (Thou wilt have time enough for hymns divine, Since Heav'n's eternal year is thine.)"

"Art she had none, yet wanted none: For Nature did that want supply."

"More and more, we are being required to know what are the implications of living in a society that is increasingly diverse through the arrival of immigrants from all walks of life and very different parts of the planet. I would like to think that our work is a tangible example of what people can achieve when they work together."

"[A] painting presents its own battle, its own requirements. And a print is never a reproduction of a painting. It makes its own demands, it has its own life, its own thing going for it."

"Being an artist is submitting to the learning that comes from being a mother. It's all the better for the work in the end. It enriches your field of understanding of human nature, all the hards bits and the good bits, the whole thing...Ultimately, the way forward is to be grateful for the blessings that come from accepting those challenges."

"When you're painting, nobody else knows what you're doing and you're the only one who understands it. You've got to have faith in what you're doing and in humanity."

"I couldn't imagine painting anyone I didn't like. When people do appear in my paintings, they're always people for whom I have a special feeling."

"A consistent thread in my work is that it’s made in response to place, and what’s happening around me – physical and social environments provide the raw material, the inspiration, the starting point."

"When you're painting you feel quite attune with everything... it's a great pleasure, quite addictive."

"My work is centred around the Treaty of Waitangi. It’s to do with rangatiratanga, our atua, our taonga, and rights, living rights, arts and cultural rights."

"Activism to bring political or social change is not far from my mind when I paint. I like to discuss and, if necessary, confront matters that I consider need discussion or redress. I do not and cannot separate my painting from my moral and ethical motives. They are one and the same. They (ideas, values) feed into each other when I work, giving me the platform to express being a Māori woman in New Zealand."

"Art is a structure of symbols, and those people who do not comprehend that language will pass it by."

"Video allows me to look beyond that framework and to show these characters as alive, proud, handsome, and strong."

"The issues that I’m always discussing are economic, social and environmental. And land rights tie back into the basis of justice in our country, the covenant of the country, the korowai of the country. So my imagery is cultural and traditional but it is also contemporary and futuristic."

"I don't want to work unless there is some meaning that by painting I can communicate something personal and political. A painting is ambiguous, very sensuous and has to come from your core."

"The Treaty will always be the basis of my work. The issues I'm always discussing are economic, social and environmental... back into the basis of justice in our country, the covenant of the country, the korowai of the country."

"I felt very strongly about feminism and photography better expressed my political ideals."

"It was too hard to be a feminist artist on your own; the criticism was too great to bear."

"Mahuika (the goddess of fire) sits on a stool. She’s talked about as being part of the underworld… I’ve kind of contemporised what this underworld is… My Mahuika sits on a Marcel Breuer chair...I wanted to update my version of my Māori goddess by presenting her in this century… thinking about what does she look like, what does she mean and what does she say?"

"Māori women are said not to carve, and I’ve always pushed the boundaries, so in terms of using media and photographic tools or film or video it’s my way of being able to carve. So rather than photographs I think of them as ancestral figures."

"Politics is life is art is life is politics. It's all interwoven, like a whāriki, like a mat."

"For me and my marae, and my place for my community, it’s really important that it’s inclusive and that all people feel welcome and there’s a place for everybody inside the house."

"Marakihau is one of my favourite works because it effectively replicates carving traditions. Marakihau is a word specific only to carving, it is a taniwha; water monsters that usually relate to specific locales inland or at sea. Taniwha are guardians of a place, so they can be both terrifying and good. They were said to inhabit dangerous places as a way to warn people of potential danger… My Marakihau is a composite of oceanic stuff; she has kelp dreadlocks and fishy bits. I styled this on the 1980s Soul II Soul Club Classics album cover with flying dreads, and my taniwha holds a bull’s horn like a big smoking chalice."

"I might refer to the female now, but she is always active, symbolic of female action and although painted in a sensual style, she is not up for sale, not offered to the viewer. This is one of the reasons I started using animals."

"I think I would have been more successful, but less interesting."

"They become a body not a person, then just an image not an image of a person."

"Typically, young women of her class were expected to marry someone rich and titled, but she rebelled almost from childhood...She was a wonderful mother to those children and a treasure for Mexico and for me...She made a decision to live her own life and not the life that was expected of her. Or perhaps she followed a vocation more than she made a decision. I am filled with admiration for her integrity—defending it against the rules of a social class that prevented gifted people from becoming all that they had in them to become. Carrington never gave in...She defended her integrity from the beginning of her life in a very blunt way"

"Before taking up the actual facts of my experience, I want to say that the sentence passed on me by society at that particular time was probably, surely even, a god-send, for I was not aware of the importance of health, I mean of the absolute necessity of having a healthy body to avoid disaster in the liberation of the mind. More important yet, the necessity that others be with me that we may feed each other with our knowledge and thus constitute the Whole…The time had not come for me to understand. What I am going to endeavor to express here with the utmost fidelity was but an embryo of knowledge. (from first page)"

"There are things that are not sayable. That’s why we have art. (2009)"

"Strange how the bible always seems to end up in misery and cataclysm. I often wondered how their angry and vicious God became so popular. Humanity is very strange and I don’t pretend to understand anything, however why worship something that only sends you plagues and massacres? and why was Eve blamed for everything? (p20)"

""I am never lonely...Or rather I never suffer from loneliness. I suffer much from the idea that my loneliness might be taken away from me by a lot of mercilessly well meaning people. Of course I never hope that you will understand me, so all I ask is that you do not imagine that you are persuading me into something when you are actually forcing me against my will." (p18)"

"I am afraid I am going to drift into fiction, truthful but incomplete, for lack of some details which I cannot conjure up today and which might have enlightened us. This morning, the idea of the egg came again to my mind and I thought that I could use it as a crystal to look at Madrid in those days of July and August 1940—for why should it not enclose my own experiences as well as the past and future history of the Universe? The egg is the macrocosm and the microcosm, the dividing line between the Big and the Small which makes it impossible to see the whole. To possess a telescope without its other essential half—the microscope—seems to me a symbol of the darkest incomprehension. The task of the right eye is to peer into the telescope, while the left eye peers into the microscope. (August 24, 1943)"

"If I remember correctly writers usually find some excuse for their books, although why one should excuse oneself for having such a quiet and peaceful occupation I really don't know. Military people never seem to apologize for killing each other yet novelists feel ashamed for writing some nice inert paper book that is not certain to be read by anybody. Values are very strange, they change so quickly I can’t keep track of them. (p21)"

"Widely read in alchemical writings, a regular pilgrim since 1971 to the lamas in exile from Tibet, analysed by followers of Jung, and loyal to a fierce and personal brand of feminist idealism, Leonora Carrington never altogether sheds in her quest for wisdom a wonderful, saving mischievousness. Her great friend and collector Edward James wrote over her door in Mexico, "This is the house of the Sphinx." A sphinx, yes, but a sphinx who sets riddles not to confound or mock but to provoke laughter and open doors in the chambers of the mind, where love and fear and the other passions have their seat. She has said, "I try to empty myself of images which have made me blind": in many ways she is breaking spells which blind others' sight too, although the landscape she travels remains a place enchanted."

"When Carmella gave me the present of a hearing trumpet she may have foreseen some of the consequences. (first line)"

"Houses are really bodies. We connect ourselves with walls, roofs, and objects just as we hang on to our livers, skeletons, flesh and bloodstream. (p13)"

"“...I believe in inspiration, an inspired conversation between two people with some mysterious affinity can bring more joy into life than even the most expensive kind of clock. Unfortunately there are very few inspired people and one has to fall back on one’s own store of vital fire, this is most exhausting especially, as you know, I have to work day and night even if all my bones ache and my head is swimming and I am fainting with fatigue and nobody understands my mortal fight to keep on my feet and not to lose my inspired joy of life even if I do have palpitations of the heart and they drive me like a poor beast of burden I often feel like Joan of Arc so dreadfully misunderstood and all those terrible cardinals and bishops prodding her poor agonized mind with so many unnecessary questions. I can’t help feeling some deep affinity with Joan of Arc and I often feel I am being burned at the stake just because I have always refused to give up that wonderful strange power I have inside me that becomes manifested when I am in harmonious communication with some other inspired being like myself.” (p25)"

"I have never lost my faith in my painting, my work, as a child or an adult, in sickness or health, success or failure, peace or war ..."

"I have been able to devote my energies to what I really am, a woman painter. It is my life."

"I am still trying to express ... the vast variations & endless possibilities in paint."

"It's all there, the strangeness, colour, exhilaration."

"I've tried through the medium of paint to express ... how simple and wonderful living is ..."

"I, as other painters do, live to paint and paint to live."

"I haven't any desire for success or the limelight, and no further wish to explain myself. Neither do I wish to play, any more than I can help, a part in the world of petty tyranny, greed and murder, and war ... My pacifism and my paintings are now closely linked."

"I paint colour as a woman sees and hears..."

"I live alone to work ... My friends are very few now, but more quality. Friends, family and works of art are the only reasons why I live."