Night Fisherman

Lately I have been into doing contemporary art and feel myself developing my own distinct style more and more. This has been years in coming and influenced strongly by the women artists who I read about in Ninth St. Women by Mary Gabriel. Lee Krasner, Elaine De Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell and Helen Frankenthaler were the post war contemporaries of male artists like Jackson Pollock and Willem De Kooning, who never really got what they were due as artists in their own right. Stories about the male artists always pictured them as not much more than helpmeets who were drawn into often dramatic lives of their artist mates.

The undercurrent message was and, to my amazement in 2021, still can be that women can't paint. Supposedly our lives are so dominated by housework and jobs and children that we can't muster the all encompassing devotion necessary to be a “true" artist. This is, of course, horseshit. But it it is still trumpeted by the likes of Georg Baselitz, who is famous for painting people upside down. He is entitled to his perspective, of course, but it could be part of the problem.