P A U L A M c C A R T Y
Women Who Painted
This series began with my desire to explore digital painting. In early 2016 I started with my smartphone, which had a stylus and a basic painting app. The screen was small (4 x 2.75 inches). I found the immediacy digital painting offered appealing and became absorbed in the process. I set myself the task of drawing one historical female painter each month and more if time allowed. My research revealed new artists to me. I thought of these initial tiny works as thumbnail paintings to work out ideas for works on canvas, and some did make it onto canvas. As the series grew, I eventually upgraded to an iPad to continue the digital portraits and have since limited this body of work to a digital format.
Having painted for years, I have had the time and distance to reflect on my role as a painter in a larger framework, and my appreciation for historical women painters has deepened. I feel connected to these women simply by having the same vocation, with its inherent struggles and rewards. Paying homage to these artists who paved the way is a way of honoring and increasing awareness of them. The National Museum of Women in the Arts has some facts about the representation of women in the arts. One of the most astonishing is that of the 318 artists featured in H.W. Jansen's Basic History of Western Art (9th edition) only 27 are women. This work is a way of rewriting history and underscoring these deserving women and their contributions to the art world.