Quotes by Women Artists

Frida Kahlo

Leni Riefenstahl

Georgia O'Keeffe

Beatrix Potter

Tove Jansson

Käthe Kollwitz

Berthe Morisot

When I have had such men before my camera my whole soul has endeavored to do its duty to them in recording faithfully the greatness of the inner as well as the features of the outer man. The photograph thus taken has almost the embodiment of a prayer.

Julia Margaret Cameron

When I say I want to photograph someone, what it really means is that I'd like to know them. Anyone I know I photograph.

Annie Leibovitz

Become one with eternity.
Become part of your environment.
Take off your clothes.
Forget yourself. Make love.
Self-destruction is the only
way to peace.

Love must be learned, and learned again and again; there is no end to it. Hate needs no instruction, but waits only to be provoked.

Katherine Porter

There are hurts so deep that one cannot reach them or heal them with words.

At the moment my art is situated between the pornographic tendency to reveal everything and the erotic inclination to hide what it's all about.

I cannot solve the problem of life by losing myself in the problem of art.

To reclaim our past and insist that it become a part of our human history is the task that lies before us. For the future requires that women, as well as men, shape the world destiny.

Change only what you can't live with, but try to accept who you are, and say yes to what makes you unique. Your confidence will make you sexier than any beauty product or accessory you could possibly buy.

Always watch the hands. The hands will tell you everything you need to know.

The running shoe... could be called the Swiss Army knife of footwear... What appeal is there to a shoe whose only selling point is comfort?

To live, to have so much ambition, to suffer, to cry, to fight and, at the end, forgetfulness... as if I had never existed.

Marie Bashkirtseff

To marry and have children is the ideal life for a woman. What career could ever be as fine? To give the world splendid men and women-isn't that the noblest thing a woman could possibly do?

Jessie Willcox Smith

It is terrifying to think of what a commodity art has become.

For I am coconut / and the heart of me / is sweeter / than you know.

In the beginning there was Isis: Oldest of the Old, She was the Goddess from whom all Becoming Arose. She was the Great Lady, Mistress of the two Lands of Egypt, Mistress of Shelter, Mistress of Heaven, Mistress of the House of Life, Mistress of the word of God. She was the Unique. In all Her great and wonderful works She was a wiser magician and more excellent than any other God.

Painting is a lot harder than pickin' cotton. Cotton's right there for you to pull off the stalk, but to paint, you got to sweat your mind.

Clementine Hunter

I want to speak, show, see, and hear outrageously astute questions and comments. I want to be on the sides of pleasure and laughter and to disrupt the dour certainties of pictures, property, and power.

All changes pass me like a dream,
I neither sing nor pray;
And thou art like the poisonous tree
That stole my life away.

Elizabeth Siddal

I often compare my method of working to that of a well-meaning freed woman in a Northern state who is attempting to delineate the horrors of Southern slavery but with next to no resources, other than some paper and a pen knife and some people she'd like to kill.

It was clear, I was not Manet's type. Picasso—who had a way with women—only used me & Duchamp never even considered me.

Carrie Mae Weems

Our bones ache only while the flesh is on them. Stretch it as thin as the temple flesh of an ailing woman and still it serves to ache the bone and to move the bone about; and in like manner the night is a skin pulled over the head of day that the day may be in a torment. We will find no comfort until the night melts away; until the fury of the night rots out its fire.

The point in all cases is that the deities must be made to laugh.

Is she as pretty as a picture
Or clear as crystal
Or pure as a lily
Or black as coal
Or sharp as a razor?

I didn't want to be a woman artist, I just wanted to be an artist.