Women Artists

"Painting reduces me to tears and misery: peaks of ecstasy, depths of disillusion..."

"To Dorothy Kate Richmond, 1903: "Come to Tetuan. Come—catch the next steamer, cancel all engagements, chuck the studio let everything go to the winds only come without a moment's delay and value for yourself all the dreams of beauty colour and sunshine...""

"To her brother, August 1940: "My aspect of the family talent, or curse? has taken the form of a deep intellectual experience, a force which has given me no rest or peace but infinite joy and sometimes even rapture.""

"1912: "I was born in Dunedin; we were an English family in a Scottish settlement.""

"In describing a town in Morocco, Tétouan: "The whiteness and pearliness of the town simply defies you-you can't get it pure and brilliant enough and the shadows drive one silly-you race after them , pause one frenzied moment to decide on a blue mauve yellow or green shadow-when up and over the wall and away and the wretched things gone for that day at least and you are gazing at a glaring blank wall and wondering why on earth you ever started to sketch it.""

"It is one of the tragedies of leaving Home—New Zealand is too far away—it ceases to be real. New Zealanders like myself cannot help becoming de-nationalized—they have no country—it is sad—but true ... Art is like that—it absorbs your whole life and being. Few women can do it successfully. It requires enormous vitality. That is my conception of genius—vitality.""

"But au fond-deep in my work-I am steadfast and steady as a rock... My present work is consistent-I shall sink or swim by it-I think swim-."

"1895: "I am slowly settling down to an oldmaidship, and I have only one prominent idea and that is that nothing will interfere between me and my work.""

"To her mother, 1921: "Don't let N Zealand wait to put up a memorial tablet to my memory—let her help me now whilst I am working at work that I hope will live after me.""

"a world in which the hospital industrial complex makes “obsolete” different bodies"

"Why would anyone write about illness except the ill? And at first, too, the experience is too close for the ill person to be a reliable witness. The mind doesn’t want to write about the body’s condition but to change it, for in dreams the body can still dance!"

"It’s curious that the Latin root of the Middle English word for tradition, tradere, means not only to “impart” and “give over,” but also to “betray."

"“I always think that if I let go and go into the large outer space, I won’t find my way back. It’s just fear of the unknown…and I don’t know if I could come back…. I have fear of the unknown in general, whereas other people want to go out and explore the unknown."

"There is so much to learn when it comes to textile art, its so expansive in many different directions, and the experimentation that comes with fabrics and techniques makes it a never-ending learning experience which I love."

"I like wrapped things like Egyptian mummies, American burial costumes, and other archaeological finds."

"I can’t write myself except through reading others’ words."

"You know what will happen if you stop – but you dont know what will happen if you keep going, and the possibilities there are endless.” This means to me that no matter what it is always important to keep making your art, even if you think its bad, or no one cares, or there is no point. Because someday, someone will like it, and there will be a reason to it all, but theres no way you CAN get to that possibility if you stop. I think it is so important to keep in mind even small steps over time can create huge change in your practice when you look back."

"Now I am beginning to see what a line is about. To see that I can choose to draw little lines, a one big sweep of the arm line, a coiled or an uncoiled line, crossing lines, spiraled lines, decorative lines, random lines, and it's all the same line. Where and how these lines are placed and colored make the drawing what it is, that composition is perhaps the truly difficult element in the making of a drawing. Now I have really to think about what I am doing while drawing in order for Jeff to write a program to deal with what I can do as second nature. This thinking has made the making of the hand work much clearer. We consider each drawing element as an independent element. This is artificial. Yet, this artificiality is precisely one aspect of the use of a mathematical attitude—the separation and isolation of individual elements of a problem. Our computer graphic efforts have shown us just how complex even the most simple meaningful hand made drawing is. In addition to making drawings using the computer, we appear to be finding out just what the making of a drawing is about regardless of its medium."

"I have been making art for mostly my entire life, I started out drawing video game characters when I was a kid."

"I always seem to be in the process of learning about line and land forms. I learn from what I see and what I draw. What my hand-eye draws is different from what the computer draws. A computer helps by offering new visual ideas. These ideas in turn enrich new hand work which generates additional ideas which extends my thinking about computer generated lines. The learning circle closes on itself. The computer and Jeff force me to verbalization and conception of what the making of a graphic drawing really is about. And I in turn force Jeff to think about the programming of serious aesthetic drawing problems. Together we try to define what makes up a drawing we would like to see. Without conscious understanding of what a drawing is we could not use the computer as a drawing medium."

"A field has no center, and is not really flat, so I use no flat areas. The form of grass as grass, leaves as leaves, is what I’m exploring…Line as form. Grass as form. Grass is also random and random is a natural computer facility. Computer grass is natural grass."

"Jeff and I have been making two-dimensional art for a long time. I've been making paintings and drawings since childhood and was educated as an artist. Jeff has been thinking what mathematicians think and writing it down since childhood and was educated as a mathematician and as an artist. In the 1960's Jeff became involved with computers and their programming and with using the computer to help people solve their problems."

"A line carves out form on a white sheet of paper, a line carves out implied visual space. A line is an abstract element which I have seen and explored. A line is grass or the edge of a leaf, a shape, a symbol. The line does not exist, it can be drawn."

"During my time in college I was introduced to installation art and sculpture work, and I clicked with it right away. I really loved working with large sculptural pieces but it also gets hard to find space to store and make work like that, which is what lead me to soft sculpture & textiles."

"I could never be a Minimalist artist: I am interested in corrupting fine art with everything I wish for. I want adventure and to feel the same sense of command that I imagine an explorer or a scientist would––like a visitor trespassing"

"I get a real charge from ancient Tibetan, Himalayan, and Indian art. I am obsessed by the clouds in Chinese and Tibetan paintings and their representation of strange creatures and mystical worlds . . . Both Eastern and Western references are deposited in the wor"

"A life that is never tasted when girls is at home are arrested. Gold ties, tighten, play her a fool time, time and time and so it can be imagined chocolate drips from tomato clouds will finally lossen and I will stick, sticky in love with freedom as this."

"origin is no place at all and can only be fabricated out of difference, division designed out of exclusion and extraordinary harm. Country as home is a contemporary concept riddled with empires"

"Mother gathered Three or no more dirty black stones, tossed them to sky that could break what had hardened her ground and without frown or flirt of flower father like grease or butter slipped aside to free her from forty and some more grown men who held."

"without conscious understanding of what a drawing is we could not use the computer as a drawing medium…We ask this new medium questions and get new (and old) answers. But some of the answers were there from the beginning."

"When the University of Kansas was given a plotter in 1967, Jeff was asked to test it. We began to think of drawing lines with it in ways that we found visually interesting. Together, we had enough common background and experience to begin to use the computer graphically. Together we draw with the computer and sign the drawings ."

"The subject of all my work has been landscape. The elements of both the computer work and my hand work are often repetitive, like leaves, trees, grass and other natural landscape elements are. There is sameness and similarity, yet everything is changing. Landscape yields both texture and form. The pictorial form is usually all-over, with non-focus details which form patterns, since I feel these as essential properties of landscape. A field has no center, and is not really flat, so I use no flat areas. The form of grass as grass, leaves as leaves, is what I'm exploring."

"When we found that there was a device, a plotter which could draw lines, and a device, a computer, which could perform the calculations for driving the plotter resulting in lines which I only partly thought of beforehand, we found a very exciting but very difficult drawing medium. Using a computer-plotter extends my hand-eye-head. The computer draws, my eyes see, my hand draws, the computer is programmed by Jeff, the computer draws...in an endless productive cycle. Computer drawn lines enrich my hand lines which in turn enrich my computer drawn lines..."

"Jeff and I use the computer as a traditional drawing medium. The resulting drawings are to be seen, to hang on a wall, to communicate. They are not just examples of computer technology, not just geometry, not just mathematics. We ask this new medium questions and get new (and old) answers. But some of the answers were there from the beginning...landscape. That it is possible to use mathematical formalism and pure geometry while attempting a humanistic exploration to us is one of the primary advantages of the use of the computer as a drawing medium."

"To me, the impact of the computer on the art of drawing will be profound. If I and Jeff and a computer can formulate visual ideas which communicate more clearly to ourselves and to others than just I alone can by hand, certainly the computer's effect on other artists will be even more profound. A new kind of renaissance is beginning. All those now working visually with the computer are Giottos announcing the coming of a new visual age. Just as the technical development of the camera changed people's visual experiences and changed art during the last hundred years, the computer will affect the visual dimensions of people's lives. The pre-camera, pre-computer Chinese artist took a life-time of understanding in order to make one meaningful ink filled brushstroke. It may take a life-time to develop a computer program to make one new communicating pen line which is meaningful for us."

"The thing is, I don't really mean to disappoint you and all that, but it doesn't really matter what you do to me; I'll never tell you where he is. We're going to destroy your silly little circus. We're going to bring you down."

"Friends change toward the ill person, some revealed in their strange and beautiful kindness and some exposed in their utter, ugly selfishness."

"Today I got to where I am just my simply continuing to make art. Making friends within the artist community will always get you places as you all learn and grow your craft together."

"I was always interested in Egyptian mummies […] but later on, during the Vietnam War, when I saw all these bodies in plastic bags […] then I thought of that whole thing too. […] The string does have to do with imprisonment. […] I am very concerned about the political prisoners all over the world, and of course it had to do with my own past experiences, where I was not tied up, but it does not mean literally, physically tied up. [Y]ou can be in prison without being in a locked room. You are imprisoned by your own fears, inhibitions, phobias."

"Everything I’ve done is a statement on the, as they say, ‘human condition."

"My grandmother, my mother, and me, each one of us progressed into our own work, “I take a great deal of pride in being different from my family. Yet I know my mother would absolutely love my work. As a woman, I think she’d be very proud that I’ve chosen to do things in my own style.”"

"I had this internal need to be a healer. My mom was ill a lot when I was a kid. When she got cancer, I became interested in the progression of the disease and how she was being treated,"

"I don’t like to feel like I have to stay within a certain style. I like to see things progress and turn into other things. I’m all about adventure."

"“I want my children to be happy. I want them to find their own purpose in life rather than fall into a life that’s already set up for them"

"I’m in a position where I don’t have to be labeled… I don’t have to call myself an Indian artist to sell my work, and I decided that it was more to my advantage not to label myself as a particular kind of artist, based solely on my genealogy… now I know that I can be part of something, part of that lineage, without being defined by it."

"I liked the way they looked. They were easy to work with my hands. The drawings turned into these magical things."

"My intention from the very beginning,was to try to find a way that didn't remind me of a thousand other people that I had seen."

"“I often paint a painting until it tells me to stop, and sometimes the white ground still shows,In most cases, I try to make the white ground either a pattern, so that it can be both negative and positive space, or if not that, perhaps an atmospheric wind moving the other colors and shapes around."

"I have worked for the last 5 years on a concentrated series of figures. Even though they do make reference to something recognizable, I am still working as they were abstract with the same human scale relationships and on the same conveyance of feeling through form. Here I am speaking of the metaphor of the human body to the vessel form, but importantly a vessel that can contain nothing but air. This is how I see myself and others, as outlines or drawings which suggest form but cannot restrain or contain the spirit."

"My major concern with sculpture is with physical and psychological movement in space and its relationship to human scale. My effort is to create forms and colors which cause the mind to dance to unheard music. I feel as if I’m translating the form, tone and movement of sound into physical space and time. My sculptures often read visually as music with crescendos, resting places and rhythmic progressions."