Women Who Dare to Become Artists

In elementary school, my favorite class was art. I loved it all: painting, drawing, collage, working with clay, you name it. Just walking into the art room brought me joy. From the paintbrushes lined up in paint-spattered containers, to the stacks of colored paper just waiting to be cut up with scissors or marked up with crayons, and the cheerful artwork adorning the walls, art class was a happy place. To this day the smell of tempera paint evokes visions of a sunny classroom filled with easels, paintbrushes, and the freedom to create beautifully messy masterpieces.

I continued taking art in junior high where our teacher let us listen to the radio during class (94 WHJY!) So cool and grownup! What other class would allow that? It felt so satisfying to create something while listening to music with no pressure to Make Art. We just made collages, carved prints onto linoleum squares, and patiently assembled mosaics. We learned about artists and techniques. We, or at least I, had fun. I never wanted to be an artist, and probably never thought it was a real possibility anyway. I just liked making art.

By the time I got to high school, art was only for the artistic kids and future art school types. The real artists. It was not for amateurs like me. So I stopped taking it. My experience is hardly unique. Art isn’t encouraged in society like sports or business. Art is something for young children to play with and then cast aside for more serious pursuits. Then, after years of work, you are allowed to dabble in watercolors or take a pottery class when you retire.

But there are some kids who do want to become artists. They become artists despite the pressure to do or be something else. And this pressure is especially acute for girls who dare to want to become artists.

The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston has a current exhibit called Women Take the Floor that puts the focus on art made by women. At the entrance, a question on the wall asks museum goers if they can name five women artists. I’m sure many people can think of Georgia O’Keefe and Frida Kahlo, but then they probably come up blank. The MFA and other museums are finally trying to remedy this situation by devoting more space to women artists who have always had difficulty being recognized by a mostly male establishment.

So how do girls overcome the obstacles to becoming an artist? Fortunately, there are many picture books that give children (and adults!) a glimpse into the lives and work of female artists. Mary Cassatt may be another female artist with more widespread recognition, but her journey was still hard. In Mary Cassatt: Extraordinary Impressionist Painter, written by Barbara Herkert with paintings by Gabi Swiatkowska, the reader learns about a girl who always knew she wanted to be an artist, but “in 1860, proper girls weren’t artists.” But Mary didn’t want to be a proper girl. She wanted to be an artist. A determined young Mary enrolled in art school at sixteen and made her own way through the formidable male world of the art establishment. The men of the Salon didn’t like her work at first and rejected it. But Edgar Degas encouraged her to join him and other Impressionist painters and told her:

“We paint as we please. We break the judges rules.”

Just the right place for a girl who didn’t like to follow the rules. Mary followed his advice and her own strong temperament and painted her canvases with the vibrant colors she loved. She lived life on her own terms as an artist because

“For Mary, art was life. Life was art.”

The illustrations at the beginning of the book are more dark and somber, showing the repressive times for women she lived in and become lighter and more exuberant as Mary finds her artistic voice. Mary Cassatt is still famous for her Impressionist paintings of figures and her work is in museums all over the world.

The folk artist Clementine Hunter forged a different path. As the descendant of slaves working on a plantation at an artists colony, Clementine had no formal art training and had “never even learned to read or write.” But at night, after her duties were finished, she painted her brightly colored pictures using leftover supplies from the other artists. Kathy Whitehead does a great job showing Clementine’s determination to make art by emphasizing that she never waited for the perfect time to create (good advice for all artists.) She didn’t wait for the perfect conditions, or the perfect art supplies, and she “didn’t wait for the world to find her art. She hung a sign on her gate that read Art Exhibit. Admission 25¢. Thanks.”

When her work eventually made it to a gallery, she had to enjoy it after hours because she couldn’t go through the front door alongside the white patrons. It is clear in Art From Her Heart that Clementine Hunter had obstacles that many other artists don’t, but the joyful illustrations by Shane Evans show a hard worker who found beauty in her world and refused to let anyone stop her from expressing it through art.

In Out of this World: The Surreal Art of Leonora Carrington, by Michelle Markel and illustrated by Amanda Hall, we meet a fiercely determined girl who scribbled on the walls when she was four and knew right away that she wanted to become an artist. Her very proper English parents “wanted her to become a lady, then a rich man’s wife,” and sent her off to numerous boarding schools that she hated and was always getting kicked out of. In art school, she met surrealist painters like Max Ernst and she found her place in the art world. Of course “most of the artists were bossy older men,” but Leonora flourished and made friends with other female artists. They took pride in making art as women.

“They had no interest in painting women who looked like pretty decorations, as men had done for centuries.“

Despite World War II, moving to Mexico, and motherhood, Leonora continued painting her dreamlike, mystical pictures of strong women and fantastic scenes from her vivid imagination. And she lived life on her own terms as an artist.

“She was never rich and proper, and she never moved back to England. But she became the woman she wanted to be.“

In Dancing Through Fields of Color: The Story Of Helen Frankenthaler by Elizabeth Brown and illustrated by Aimee Sicuro, we meet another strong girl determined to become an artist. But like so many artists before her, there are rules to follow, and

“Helen never wanted to follow the rules.”

But unlike so many girls and artists in general, Helen had supportive parents “who nurtured her dreams.” They supported her art from a young age and the joy she feels from their love and her creativity is captured on the page with illustrations showing a young Helen “waltzing, twirling and leaping” across the pages. She does well in art class at school even though “Helen wanted to do things her way, but she had to follow the rules in order to pass.” Oh, those rules again. But Helen was just getting started.

The death of her beloved father when she was eleven briefly stopped her from creating art, but it was art itself that helped her to heal. Then in art school, she studied painting with professors who wanted her to follow certain rules. I think we know what happens next. Helen “longed to paint what she felt inside.” When she met Jackson Pollock and saw how he painted she asked herself,

“If he broke the rules, why couldn’t she?“

The rest of the book shows how Helen created the art movement that became known as Color Field painting. It also shows the creative process of an artist in an accessible way that children can relate to and feel. There are lots of action words like soaking, spiraling, and turning. You see her in action physically sweeping huge brushes and pouring the paint across large canvases. Colors that are prominent in her work flow through these pages and really give a sense of what her paintings are like. And you see another female artist willing to break the rules and follow her own art path.

So pick up some inspiring books about artists who break the rules and create beautiful art. Go to an art exhibit that showcases a diverse range of artists. And leave out some art supplies for the kids and for yourself to make some messy masterpieces of your own.