Quotes by Women Painters

Frida Kahlo

Georgia O'Keeffe

Berthe Morisot

Isabel Bishop

Joy Hester

Joan Lindsay

Susan Hale

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

My painting is what I have to give back to the world for what the world gives to me.

Georgia O'Keeffe

Rentals sank, living rose. I could not afford help. I must be owner, agent, landlady and janitor. I loathed landladying... I tried in every way to augment my income. Small fruit, hens, rabbits, dogs - pottery... I never painted now - had neither time nor wanting. For about fifteen years I did not paint.

I'll be in Detroit two more weeks. I would like to tell you every thing that happened to me since the last time we saw each other, but most of them are sad and you mustn't know sad things now. After all I shouldn't complain because I have been happy in many ways though. Diego is good to me, and you can't imagine how happy he has been working on the frescoes here. I have been painting a little too and that helped. I thought of you a lot and never forget your wonderful hands and the color of your eyes. I will see you soon. I am sure that in New York I will be much happier. If you still in the hospital when I come back I will bring you flowers.

Just as I came out into the rue, an omnibus came by - pas complet, so I sprang in, without that prayer and fasting which should chasten the mind before risking it in a French omnibus.

It is important that the painting can be inhabited, so that the mind's eye, or the eye's mind, can move about it credibly.

I don't think there has ever been a man who treated a woman as an equal and that's all I would have asked for, for I know I'm worth as much as they.

Somehow, one never really runs away, or I never have, and I find that the faster I go the more catches up with me... all the while time stands, to me, still - straight up and down like a great white sheet.

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

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.

Although we are necessarily concerned, in a chronicle of events, with physical action by the light of day, history suggests that the human spirit wanders farthest in the silent hours between midnight and dawn. Those dark fruitful hours, seldom recorded, whose secret flowerings breed peace and war, loves and hates, the crowning or uncrowning of heads.

I have made a solemn vow never to send my drawings because people have cheated me. In particular, just today I found... that, having done a drawing of souls in Purgatory for the Bishop of St. Gata, he, in order to spend less, commissioned another painter to do the painting using my work. If I were a man, I can't imagine it would have turned out this way.

Artemisia Gentileschi