Quotes by Women Artists

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

I like that feeling when you're making art, that you're taking the energy out of your body and putting it into a physical object. I like things that are labor-intensive : you make a little thing and another little thing and another little thing, and eventually you see a possibility.

Blue to get ready Green to go Yellow to guide you through the snow Orange to warn you that over you'll go Then red will be the final glow Now seek the black, there's no going back.

There is always something missing that torments me.

Camille Claudel

Art must be the quintessence of meaning. Creative art means that you create yourself.

Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller

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.

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

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

All the famous people had had an awful time. One of them had a drunken father. Another had a stammer. Another had to wash hundreds of dirty bottles. They had all had what was called a difficult childhood. Clearly you had to have one if you wanted to become famous.

John asked me to dance and I nearly died. Bingo! I then amazed myself by being very cool, calm and collected outwardly-inside I was out of this world. The dance was slow and smoochy. I was aloof and John, I think, was slightly embarrassed. It was all very painful and beautiful at the same time. The remaining students were looking on with puzzled expressions at such an unlikely combination.

It would be mistaken to suppose that any of the best photography is come at by intellection; it is like all art, essentially the result of an intuitive process, drawing on all that the artist is rather than on anything he thinks, far less theorizes about.

I make myself into a new image in order to produce new images.

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?

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

I feel as though I have lived many lives, experienced the heights and depths of each and like the waves of the ocean, never known rest. Throughout the years, I looked always for the unusual, for the wonderful, for the mysteries at the heart of life.

Leni Riefenstahl

I would die if I had to be confined. I don't want to feel that I'm missing out on experiencing as much as I can. For me, experiencing is knowing people all over the world and being able to photograph.

Mary Ellen Mark

Facts are the barren branches on which we hang the dear, obscuring foliage of our dreams.

Natalie Babbitt

Empty empty empty
so many empty chairs
everywhere. They look
charming in van Gogh's paintings.

Liu Xia (intellectual)

For me, the importance of photography is that you can point to something, that you can let other people see things. Ultimately, it is a matter of the specialness of the ordinary.

Rineke Dijkstra

Children are the true believers, and some of us are lucky enough to make the transition to adulthoood without ever losing the ability to see through young eyes.

My aim has always been modest; I wanted to transform the arranged marriage (of art and architecture) into a love match.

Marcelle Ferron

In talking, shyness and timidity distort the very meaning of my words. I don't pretend to know anybody well. People are like shadows to me and I am like a shadow.

We are sheep with no straight
and narrow;
We are sheep with no meadow.
We are sheep who take the
dangerous pathway thru
the mountain range
to get to the other side of
our soul.
We are the black sheep of
the family
Called Black Sheep folk.

It is my goal as an artist to create works that expose injustice and reveal beauty. The rainbow is literally a spectrum of color while spiritually a symbol of hope and promise.

One reason for making and exhibiting a work is to induce a reaction or change in the viewer.... In this sense, the work as such is nonexistent except when it functions as a medium of change between the artist and viewer.