There are these days a significant number of female artists, yet obviously the men are still for the most part successful. I think the reasons are rooted deep within the human psyche.

I begin by saying great artists are confrontational people. Cassat and Morrisot had to content themselves with nice family scenes. Gentilelschi was indeed confrontational but how many of her own paintings can you count on more than two hands and just think how badly she was treated.

Now I'll make another bold statement. Men generally speaking have a fear of women which they do not care to admit. That is why women have been oppressed historically. You will appreciate that people who are free to confront issues have power. Now women these days do have more power than ever and routinely confront issues in the daily course of business. However art is another matter. It often deals things of the unconscious. It may bring comfort but also may confront the issues we would rather not know about.

Rather than continue giving my conclusion, perhaps you ladies would care to give us what you see as the role of women in art. Do you want the power of confrontation or that of love and nurture? Quite clearly both are necessary.
Well I've put my big foot in it again and I do appreciate this isn't a comfortable matter for discussion. However, you may not feel comfortable playing second fiddle either. Great artists are not people who feel particularly comfortable with themselves let alone other people.

Mike Fone

Mike...I am posting this in response to your article...
I only heard about this Australian Artist last week...
Jan Dean told me after she heard about the artist on Radio National.......

"Although Yvonne Audette's distinctive, abstract paintings are represented in all our major art galleries, it's only now that the National Gallery of Victoria is celebrating the lyrical works which the young expatriate artist created in New York and Europe during the glory days of abstraction in the 1950s and 1960s.
Born in 1930, Yvonne Audette travelled to the US in 1952. There, as she studied art, she encountered the radical new abstract work of artists including Willem de Kooning and Robert Motherwell, Mark Tobey and Franz Kline. In 1955, she travelled extensively through Spain and then to France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and Italy, where she established a studio in Florence and later, in Milan. Audette lived and worked in Italy, presenting numerous exhibitions, until 1966 when she returned permanently to Australia.
NGV Curator Kirsty Grant said:
The experiences of Yvonne Audette's expatriate years were critical to her development as an artist. Looking at the paintings and drawings from that time, the viewer can visualise the steady evolution of Audette's graphic vocabulary, from the bold linear quality of her earliest experimentation with abstract forms to the lyrical calligraphic and graffiti works for which she is renowned."


Artist Yvonne Audette is finally gaining recognition.......

While Audette has continued to work and regularly exhibit, she says she was ignored by critics and writers for many years. "I am only just beginning to be recognised. Women from very early times weren't given their due until the last 10 or 15 years. There's been a hold up in this country, a mentality that has for some reason felt the woman was not as creative as the man, whereas she has been given equal status in Europe and America since the 1950s and '60s."
read the full article here at The Age

thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you

I have been awarded a thoughtful Blogger Award by Mark

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Thanks very much Mark....and I am passing this award onto .....

Lisa / Saboma / Anna / Deborah / Boyd



Question # 3
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Tahlia / Charlotte / Deborah

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