Quotes by Women Artists

Drawing is the simplest way of establishing a picture vocabulary because it is an instant, personal declaration of what is important and what is not.

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

That is why my pictures don't look like modern art. It's some sort of timidity on my part I'm sure.

Infinitesimal is the nearest to zero infinitesimal is so small that it is no longer something but it is not yet nothing.

Whatever happened to the tomboy I used to be, the slightly rebellious rocker?

I have helped him polish the mirrors and lenses of our new telescope. It is the largest in existence. Can you imagine the thrill of turning it to some new corner of the heavens to see something never before seen from the earth?

Forgive me not! Hate me and I shall know Some of love's fire still burns in your breast! Forgiveness finds its home in hearts at rest, On dead volcanoes only lies the snow.

Lilla Cabot Perry

I think of scientific veracity as an idea from the past - the scientists say it is so, the photo is proof. Even the authoritative power of the word actual - an actual what? An actual retouched photo, an actual collaged photo?

You're doing it again. Using reason to argue faith. Can't be done. Like playing croquet with a crochet hook. Sounds something like the right tool for the job, but isn't.

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

Documentary is a little like horror movies, putting a face on fear and transforming threat into fantasy, into imagery. One can handle imagery by leaving it behind. (It is them, not us.)

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

I wanted to make photographs that were immediate and revealing - different from traditional portraiture that called for formal distance between artist and subject.

It had never once occurred to me that the paper I wanted to work for would not want me. Certainly I never expected to be rejected solely because I was a girl!

Kathryn Tucker Windham

Threads that drift alone will sometimes simply twine themselves together, without need for spindle or distaff: brought into each other's ambit, they bind themselves tight with the force of their own torsion. And this same torsion can, in the course of things, bundle the resulting cord back upon itself, ravelling it up into a skein, returning to the point of its beginning.

I loved to press the shutter, to freeze time, to turn little slices of life into rectangle rife with metaphor.

Deborah Copaken

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

Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller

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

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.

Obsession and repetition in the process of making things is one constant element in my work.

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.

The older I get, the one thing I can trust in myself more than anything else is the way I feel about something. When I photograph I try to be as aware of my feelings as I can be to somehow try and get them out of me and onto the film in terms of the way I am responding or seeing the world.

In my work, the information is the least important part. It's there, and the work wouldn't mean the same thing without it, but it isn't structured around the information. The most interesting part to me is the visual play... looking at this little universe of representation that I can make out of the world.

You are not an artist simply because you paint or sculpt or make pots that cannot be used. An artist is a poet in his or her own medium. And when an artist produces a good piece, that work has mystery, an unsaid quality; it is alive.

Toshiko Takaezu

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.