Women Artists

"To believe in yourself and know who you are when others don't believe in you is the greatest accomplishment; to never give up, to never quit, to have faith and stand your ground. Never change who you are. Love yourself because you have already made it and you are... Somebody."

"As the days pass and the seasons change, the sky, earth, mountains and rivers repeat in patterns that are never really quite the same. In my search for the variations of the many faces in nature, I have found that nature provides an infinite source of inspiration for artistic expression,”"

"My work explores the passing of time and the tension between the human longing for reassuring repetition and — at the same time — change. I am particularly interested in our human ability to see what we expect to see, to misinterpret, to see a partial picture as the whole, to disregard incremental change, or to completely overlook the significant."

"I most heartly thank my god for Sparing My life to See this hapy day."

"I often wish I could go to my studio and paint all the time, but I can’t. I often feel disconnected, as if I’m waiting for instructions. It’s absolute torture. The first third of the time it took to make these recent paintings was spent going in every day but ending up with nothing. Then, slowly, something started to happen."

"Cool kids always think their shit doesn’t stink, but Fassbinder reminds us that our shit does stink, and on top of that it’s rotten, and it’s OK to admit that. We’re all human. I’m interested in formal language and emotional content—formalism and feelings have a perfect marriage, if you can handle it. Looking back, I realize how much of the work was led by a rather dry and clear process and yet the results are anything but dry. I set a path and let the weirdness and eccentric stuff come up on its own; all that content just found a place out of the orderly way I had set up the process."

"There are great Caravaggios in San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome—the Saint Matthew cycle. The first painting, on the left of the small chapel, is The Calling of Saint Matthew. Jesus points at Matthew, who sits across from him with his head down. Matthew is the only one who isn’t looking at Jesus. On the opposite wall, on the right side of the chapel, hangs the third painting that shows the end of the narrative, Matthew’s martyrdom: Matthew lies on the ground and some guy with a sword is standing over him, just about to murder him. Imagine how you’d feel in that moment! I stared at the painting for so long, fascinated by how everyone is freaking out except for Matthew, who is reaching up. What is he looking at? It’s an angel leaning over a cloud and extending a palm, as if holding a stick to a drowning man. You realize that Matthew is a man who lived and died with belief in eternal salvation, which is why he’s being murdered—he’s dying for his beliefs. It’s interesting that Caravaggio depicts him seeing his salvation. Everyone else sees horror and chaos, but Matthew sees an angel extending a palm. In this painting you witness him becoming something."

"So much of my work is about doing the very obvious. Making art is like finding your Excalibur, the sword in the stone. It’s right there and others can tug and tug, but you have to be Arthur to pull it out. Anyone can decide, intellectually, to make paintings where “colors come alive as characters”—but try to do it! Few people can pull it off. You have to have lived your life in a certain way, and have believed all along that that is possible, in order to make it work."

"Painters have always had to believe in formal language. It just didn’t used to be called into question as much as it is now. It is a belief that pictures can be formally coded and tell a story, and that viewers will understand that code even if they are not painters themselves. In contemporary art the language of painting is like a dialect of ancient Greek—most people just don’t understand it. Furthermore I don’t know how many people are willing to relax and let the meaning of the painting unfold, but I like to think they will feel the power of the form, almost unconsciously, whether they want to or not."

"That was partly why I made the “Bad Habits” sculptures in 1995. In going from painting to painting I was “recasting” my characters every time. I had to get to know them one by one and understand what they mean. I realized through Fassbinder that it would be interesting to have your blonde—your Hanna Schygulla—as one person in an ensemble of actors who each play a range of characters. The range should be small—you can’t make people be something they’re not. Fassbinder was aware of how to use everyone’s qualities. Their fading looks, like Fassbinder’s own physical deterioration, became his material. They all had to be very smart and not vain to allow this to happen. Fassbinder’s actors came from the theater and theater is close to sculpture, so perhaps they had an awareness of the sculptural properties of their bodies."

"So, to answer your question, when I think of being an artist, I think of the central painting, between those two, showing Saint Matthew as an old man taking dictation from an angel, doing divine work on earth. The man depicted in the painting is a nincompoop and the angel is impatiently counting on his fingers, as if Matthew isn’t keeping up. It’s so funny: that’s Caravaggio’s wit. The Passion of Saint Matthew is one of the most beautiful testaments we have, but here he is shown as a very ordinary man. I believe Caravaggio related to Matthew because of how beautifully this story is depicted, with so much feeling and sensitivity. The three paintings show the utter transformation of a man over time."

"I joyne with all My friends in the pleasing prospect that Posterity will See, and behold the Statue of the man who was apointed by his Contry, and the voice of the Enlightend Part of Mankind to be the great general to Save the Liberties of the Christian Religion and Stop the Pride and Insolence of old England. and by his truly great and Noble Example in all human Vertues he has Restord Peace on Earth, good Will toward mankind."

"Yes. And my [former husband], David Elder was the T.A. (teaching assistant) for the person teaching the sculpture class."

"I started college at Michigan State because I went to . . . two summers before that I had gone to Interlochen Music Camp and they had an art program there. And so, the man who was teaching art was also teaching at Michigan State, so I got interested in going there because of their program. So, my first year, I was I was at Michigan State and then after that I transferred to Ohio State so that I could live at home. My family did not have that . . . it was always a matter of finances to, you know, how you were going to afford to do these things. All beginning art majors, you take drawing, ceramics, painting, and everything. That was my first experience with working three-dimensionally so I was completely hooked. Before that I had, in India, all the work I had done were drawings and paintings, because I was working with [Janet Sewell], and that was all that I knew. Even as a child, I was always drawing. So, it wasn’t until I went to Michigan State and took that ceramics class. There was something about, you know, not just your ideas, but the physical information that is in your body or in your hands or something, that really clicked for me, I liked that a lot."

"Yes, he was in a graduate student in that program, and that’s how we met. We married right after I graduated and he continued as a graduate TA."

"Weaving has been the thread that has held my life together for more than fifty years. One has to fill the minutes, hours, days and years that are given to you with something, and it seems that weaving chose me. In essence, I see my life as the latest iteration in the long line of weavers that stretch back beyond recorded history. I feel blessed to be in this lineage."

"I consider all work as studies, just one step on the path from here to there—and who knows where there is going to end up being. However, with time, the nature of weaving itself became more prominent in my work. So you find notations about how they are made, diagrams of weave drafts, and recordings of their materials. This also became helpful in my teaching. Instead of looking for written notes on the work, I could just refer to the work itself."

"What I am interested in doing is helping people see in a particular kind of way and to see what is already here- to sort of move and change things that are already a part of this particular enviornment. I am trying to do that in a very subtle way by saying: well, my human quality is a different kind of organisational quality. For instance the grey piece is laid out in a series of mounds with a grid. Everything else in the landscape is totally random. When the rocks fall, they simply fall and there is no particular design. Whereas I lay my human design on it."

"References to weaving abound in literature throughout human history. The process of weaving takes hundreds of individual threads, and combines them into a cohesive plane. It is the perfect metaphor for how we build our lives from multiple identities and interests into a singular personality. It is also a good metaphor for interconnectedness of any sort—family, community, governance. Weaving doesn’t always yield narratives, but in my work, the resulting combination of images and words reveal a propensity towards storytelling. Rooted in the physical making of the work, I honor the skill that has developed in my hands from years of weaving; and I listen for the insights that arise from my hands to my head, and vice versa."

"I’ve tried to live a holistic life, honoring my general curiosity, acknowledging the wonderful diversity of human societies while noting the similarities of our species. I didn’t intend to be a weaver; it began as a tenuous thread, but it became my lifeline. It didn’t lead to a concise understanding of the world or even of the nature of weaving itself, but unfolded into ever-evolving questions about the mechanism of the process, what it has been, can be, and what could I make of it."

"No, nobody. The families really were . . . my mother’s family lived in Lafayette, Indiana and she came from a really large family, and my dad’s family, were obviously, all farmers. So, there was no role model at all. I think the most sophisticated experience I had was when I was in high school, my freshman and sophomore year, my father was in India with the Point 4 program, and I worked with a woman [whose husband was with the foreign service in Delhi], who was an artist and she had a studio. And I worked with her several mornings a week. So, that became, I suppose, that was my very first real practical experience of what an artist did. She would work in her studio in the morning . . . she would not answer the telephone. Her friends all knew not to call her at certain times, so that was probably my first experience with that."

"It was, we went to art museums, we traveled through Europe on our way home. We didn’t do any stopping when we went to India, but on the way back, which was better, because by then I was 16 and so I saw a lot of things I wouldn’t have seen if I was just living in Ohio."

"Well, the art department there was very different than it is now."

"The sculpture department was over in some agronomy building in the basement or something because they had a very old building and, there just wasn’t room for all the classes. Now they have a huge new building. I went to interview someone that we were interviewing as a Dean who was in their Art History department, and their Art department now is in a huge building, it has like 12 floors or something and three floors are devoted just to computers. So it is a very different department now than it was then, but when I was there it was very intimate and you could work there all the time, all day, on the weekends if you wanted to. They had visiting artists. I remember David Smith came one time and spoke to us, and talked to us in our studios and I remember I was complaining to him about something, I can’t remember. I didn’t have enough of something, I was complaining because the school didn’t provide it and he just said, “Well, go get it!” And I said, “Oh yeah.” It just never dawned on me, “Oh yeah! I’m in charge of what I’m doing! If I need something, just go get it!”"

"I’ve come to experience art like a séance. Over time you can meld minds with artists: you laugh and feel their humor, or you are shocked by their sadness and grief. The main thing that comes across in Bellini’s paintings is the awesome potency and profound depth of feeling that made them. I’ve spent a good deal of my life looking at paintings, and what stands out to me is that, no matter when the painters lived, there are a lot of similarities among them. The work carries markers of the artist’s inner life—be it Carroll Dunham’s or Giovanni Bellini’s—for us to connect to. I find that humanity in art very appealing because it just cuts away all the layers of academia. Scholarship can buoy understanding in some ways but after a point can also drag you down, away from the art. Since contemporary artists are not hired by, say, the Vatican, we have the freedom to ask ourselves what we believe in and then to assert that belief. It’s actually a powerful liberty to own, and especially nice in our time when there are so many women’s voices in the mix."

"The best paintings of depositions, crucifixions and entombments are images that are familiar if you’ve ever buried someone you love. Just today, I saw an image in the New York Daily News of the brother of Moises Locón Yac, who was killed in the explosion on Second Avenue on March 26, collapsing in the arms of a Red Cross worker. You see the same configuration in paintings of Mary Magdalene mourning Christ. I remember things through great pictures. When I look at Renaissance masterpieces I recall scenes like the one on Second Avenue—the profound grief of families realizing that their loved ones have been killed."

"The interesting thing about Hippies is how those male figures jump out from behind the central woman, and the painting did that to me—in the process of making it, the men said, “Ta-da!” They came out of the work. And I had to ask myself where to take it next. I think that Hippies should have come after the portraits it was shown with at David Zwirner this spring, but it didn’t, it came first. I decided to make six to eight portraits of incubi and succubae using the structural idea of a grisaille painting with a flourish of what is called cangiantismo, a sort of spectral color-wheel effect that contrasts the grays. In the 16th century the Italian viewer understood it as a signal that the supernatural had arrived."

"I’ve done grisaille paintings with flashes of intense color over the years. One painting like that would surface as an isolated element in a body of work every now and then. When Hippies appeared I wanted to see what would happen if I just stayed with it and didn’t let up. I really didn’t know where I was going, but at some point the art critic Christian Viveros-Fauné came to my studio and said it reminded him of the “Bad Babies” series [1991-92]. Both groups of paintings personify color. I remember looking at my palette table and telling Christian, “I just want to make this come alive.” It’s such a stupid idea, and yet I think that is what I did. I just had to keep believing in it. When things went wrong, when they veered off course, I would tell myself to just trust the process."

"I arranged the “Bad Habits” figurines into groups, which I studied to make the paintings. I was thinking about how Tintoretto made wax figures to illuminate scenes and understand complicated lighting. “Bad Habits” is about light. To keep my focus on that aspect of the work, I didn’t want to have to keep reinventing characters. I could have kept working on that series forever but I made myself stop. I realized that as an artist I was about more than that, so I forced myself to move on."

"One of the ideas about art that was gaining momentum when I was student, which I heard but didn’t take seriously, was that psychology has no place in painting. And so, as a 19-year-old, I responded by putting it back there, boldly and for no good fucking reason."

"I love Solzhenitsyn’s writing for his insights into morality and humanity, and today I came across a quote from The Gulag Archipelago: “If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” I love that idea. If you think of yourself as “good,” you should think about how easily you could be evil under different circumstances. It’s important to embrace the range and try to comprehend it. Philip Guston said something similar when he talked about imagining himself like Isaac Babel, who wrote about riding around with the Red Army during the Polish-Soviet War, witnessing rape, pillage and killing. Guston was able to envision himself not only through the lens of the Italian painters he adored, but through the hooded figures of Ku Klux Klan. He recognized that the enemy lies within."

"Misogyny. There is no exact parallel to the story. I didn’t read a great writer like Babel who contextualized it for me. What I learned from Guston is that if you point the finger at yourself first, then you are freer. Misogyny is so rampant, extreme and insidious that it doesn’t get called out nearly enough. A lot of men, including gay men, are misogynists, and a lot of women are too. I’ve experienced it personally from so many, and I can therefore assume that because I live in this society I must have absorbed it too, so if I want to talk about misogyny I have to first acknowledge the aspects of it I’ve absorbed. I’m not the kind of person or artist, nor do I admire the kind of person or artist, who proselytizes, pontificates or points outward at others. I admire Guston and Diane Arbus and Fassbinder because they show a myriad of internal conflicts. That’s what art is—a struggle filtered through the self. That is how it becomes generous."

"Ever since we were at Yale together, John Currin has said he admires my ability to believe. I remember once in a critique of my work, my teacher William Bailey was furious that it didn’t have enough “fiction building.” He quoted Magritte: “Ceci n’est pas une pipe, Lisa!” I said, “But I want the paintings to be real!” To which he snapped, “Well, that’s not a good goal.” John was at that critique, and he jumped in, saying: “I actually think it’s amazing she thinks they’re real!”"

"It was a very important argument for me, because I understood that there is an orthodox way of looking at things: “This is a representation. This is not a pipe, it’s a painting. It’s not real,” which feels pretty obvious and rather dull at this point. There was this other possibility that seemed juicier and more fucked up and hopeful. And I did have to come to a synthetic approach to making, but once I could do that, I could also believe in painting again, and make it real again. I’ve taken it to that next step, and my gamble is to succeed or fail at that."

"To grow the love of nature globally amongst the local and international art communities and to call attention to our need to preserve our earth,"

"I have found painting in water media – acrylic demands an absolute control of the medium to achieve the various effects, textures, and transparencies.The scale of the painting is a challenge, but not a limitation for me. To produce on canvas or paper what I have in my mind, my ideas and feelings on the universe, is a great challenge"

"My current artwork uses the lines and patterns from daily weather maps and images of weather — rain, snow, clouds, hail — as visual metaphors for these ideas. It explores the constancy, variation, and violence hidden within the familiar, reassuring seasonal cycle. I also use images of oceans — stormy, placid, or dramatic — as visual reflections of human moods and emotions."

"Like a human life, my artwork is multi-layered, complex, and develops over time. Color, texture, humor, and the physical joy of applying paint and cutting relief prints are important in the creation of my work. In the process of creating a piece, I begin working on an idea with a loosely drawn skeleton. I add layers of paint and drawing, building up layers of meanings and emphasis to create a finished piece that is dense with meaning."

"Nothing is easy. It is not easy to have a baby, for a tree to grow—but that’s what is beautiful."

"I don't know what is important and what is unimportant, so I call it all immensely important."

"Almost from the start, I tried to map my mental activities in a series of woven collages. Just as thoughts loop, certain imagery is found again and again—my handwritten calculations for converting images into physical threads, repetitive counting, diagrams, and glimpses of nature are some of the phenomena that fill my head and these canvases. Over the years my work has seesawed between identifiable narratives and abstract imagery; my quest to understand spiritual systems has entered the weavings in recognized and abstract symbols; and I never shied away from beauty."

"I grew up in Indiana and my earlier memories were of living on a farm. We lived on my grandfather’s farm in Indiana and actually, it’s interesting, that location was called Sand Hill Farm. My grandfather was Amish and his property was just adjacent to his parents’. So, they had lots of land so they were farmers and that’s where I started. When I was about six years old, I remember some friends of my parents gave my mother and I Christmas presents, and they gave my mother colored pencils and they gave me perfume, and to this day I think they must have gotten it mixed up because I was terribly insulted, I thought, you know, “I’m the artist, I should have gotten the colored pencils!” So, at a very early age, somehow, even though I was living on a farm and had really no idea what it meant to be an artist, I considered myself to be a creative person."

"David got a job teaching at Valparaiso University, which is where he graduated from, that’s in Indiana. And, I did some things. Again, I was kind of back to doing drawings. We were there for a couple years and then moved to California."

"Although some members of the public misunderstood and even ridiculed her work, Marguerite seemed unaffected. She was brave and clear about who she was and what she believed. She also had William's full support, and they continued to paint in the same studio, helping each other with canvases, with ideas, with promoting their paintings. Although they struggled financially, these were rich, exciting years, and their collaboration nurtured them both. They exhibited paintings in their studio as well as at galleries, and they were at the center of the avant-garde community of American artists in New York (Kennedy 97)."

"When I do these performances now, the feeling in my body seems to mirror that lake experience. I did a performance a few years ago where I threw myself through sheets of glass and after that I found the vocabulary to describe how I felt physically eluded me. It was like a secret in my body. When thinking about how to approach the reenactment, I started reading about how William Turner worked. He would take real-life events and turn them into the most beautiful images using color and light. He was also very interested in the sublime—man’s powerlessness in the face of nature. I channeled him as an inspiration when making the video."

"There are two phases of the exhibition—day and night. When you walk into the gallery during the day, in this reality, it is actually night. There are 75 night-blooming jasmine plants in boxes with shop lights above them suspended from the ceiling. Because the lights are off, the plants are tricked into thinking it is night and release their rich smell. The viewer walks through a maze of flowers and arrives at the video projected on a screen of myself walking and falling through a frozen lake in the center of the gallery. There is an audio score accompanying the video by experimental jazz composer Jason Ajemian. Every day at 5:30pm, the video turns off and the lights start to turn on in a synchronized choreography to a piece of music. The "day" then begins and the lights turn off again at 5:30am. It is a very sensorial experience with smell, video, light, color, and sound."

"I start researching and make calls to people whom I think can help me. The first 10 calls are all usually the same: “You can’t do that, it's impossible.” But then I find someone who is one the same page as me and the fun starts. When we finally have a date, then I prepare physically and mentally. Trampoline training, tai chi practice, ice baths, ashram stays, etc. A lot of research goes into the projects—the goal is to make the final image."

"For this project, I am wearing a suit made of raw silk inspired by William Turner’s color palette in "The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons." I wanted the fabric to reflect the light like the golden flames in the painting."

"Since pictures such as mine are so different from the pictures people are used to framing, it isn’t really strange that they should require different treatment. White not being a color (as is gold) forms the best frames for pictures high in key and in pure color, as it does not destroy the balance of color in the picture and brings out each color in its fuller intensity. Black is next best, I think."

"I have no artistic creed or formula. I have no fixed aim to which I am bending every energy. I have made no wonderful or new artistic discovery. Perhaps I have not even a new vision…In so far as my life is rich in emotional and intellectual experiences, actual or in imagination, in so far as I seek for a deeper and more comprehensive grasp of things, in so far I shall have material from which to create."