HOKUSAI AND VAN GOGH - painted and observed their environments in which they found magic and inspiration in the elements. They portrayed nature's power.

 

CAVE PAINTERS - made their mark decorated their homes may be to entertain the young and old and to regale in the long winters underground. They used the materials they had to hand

 

LOUISE BOURGEOIS said -"I didn't intend to be an artist." Her passions were mathematics and philosophy. Best of all, she liked solid geometry, a field, she has said, "where relations can be anticipated and are eternal."

 

“Drawings are thought feathers, they are ideas that I seize in mid-flight and put down on paper.”

 

In 1958, aged 47, Bourgeois complained ‘I have failed as a wife, as a woman, as a mother, as a hostess, as an artist, as a businesswoman, as a friend, as a daughter, as a sister but  I have not failed as a truth seeker…"

 

“I have been to Hell and back and let me tell you, it was wonderful.’

 

VANESSA BELL- a member of the Omega movement and the Bloomsbury group. Painter, mother, daughter, wife, lover, survivor, decorator, and sister to Virginia Woolf.

 

American Dorothy Parker remarked that the group "lived in squares, painted in circles, and loved in triangles.

 

“Oh Julian, I can never express what happiness you've given me in my life. I often wonder how such luck has fallen my way. Just having children seemed such incredible delight, but that they should care for me as you make me feel you do, is something beyond all dreaming of — or even wanting. I never expected it or hoped for it, for it seemed enough to care so much oneself.” Vanessa Bell, to Julian Bell (1935), in Regina Marler, ed., Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell (1998)

 

MARY OLIVER - Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? 

 

"Oliver teases apart the mechanisms by which poetry enchants us, exploring the magic of rhythm as not only the fire in the belly of poetry but also a gateway into a profound human longing.

Oliver considers the intricate courtship between poetry and the soul:

Rhythm is one of the most powerful of pleasures, and when we feel a pleasurable rhythm, we hope it will continue. When it does, it grows sweeter. When it becomes reliable, we are in a kind of body-heaven." https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/04/10/mary-oliver-poetry-handbook-rhythm/

 

​The poem, The Sun, by Mary Oliver is about how the sun is beautiful and is there for us even when we neglect it, and reveals that we sometimes forget the most wonderful things in

life.

 

ALEXANDER MACQUEEN & HANS HOLBEIN'S CATHERINE OF DENMARK

Both show women without reducing them to sexual or maternal objects they empower them showing them in an iconic and individual manner they celebrate them.

 

DORA MAURA - I went to her talk last year that accompanied her exhibition and the person I felt in her work was present like Louise Bourgeois she had a good sense of fun and was Interested in searching out answers.

 

MARK BRADFORD - "Cerberus." I love his practicality. He uses material that he has to hand. He does this with a positive upbeat method.

He uses tales and myths to create a lens and layers to explore and frame the current crisis that concerns him. He keeps one foot in the community and the other in his art.

 

BOOKS AND EVERYTHING IN THEM they are vessels that contain our loves, hopes, and magic.

SAUL BELLOW describes the novel as a latter-day lean too in which the spirit takes shelter.