Female Artists

Today I am grateful for female artists.  Each time we travel I celebrate being a female by purchasing something depicting women in a sculpture or painting, or something by a female artist.  If I can find both in one work of art, even better.

It sounds like we must live in an art gallery, but while I would love that, we don’t.  Almost.  The art doesn’t have to be huge or expensive although sometimes it is.  I bought my very first painting a long time ago in Mobile, Alabama.  We were there on an American Tile Council trip and the hotel sponsored an outdoor art show right on Mobile Bay.  John and I walked around that show a dozen times and kept being drawn back to a watercolor of a young girl who reminded me of my niece, Jenny.  It cost $95!  I was not about to spend that for a painting, which is ridiculous because now I’ve gladly spent a lot more, but John insisted, never realizing he was creating a monster.

In Jakarta I befriended a woman in the video store who invited us to her art opening.  I have a huge painting of hers from a series she called, “Women and her emotions”. Parvathi is a gorgeous Indian woman who wore traditional sarongs trimmed in bright pink, lime green and canary yellow.  Her pitch black hair brushed the back of her ankles when she walked.  She is as breathtaking as her paintings. 

At another outdoor art fair, in Montreal, Canada, I bought a mosaic of a woman with a child on her back, done of natural straw-like materials, by women native to Nairobi.  I have a large concrete sculpture of a woman I call Margarita, from Matamoros, Mexico.  Guess why I call her Margarita?  In Vienna, Austria I bought a painting of a ballerina, done with spray paint.  I have magnets and little figurines and gee-gaws from all over the world, each celebrating women.

This time, when we come back from Florida, I will bring along a painting done by an enthusiastic, little-known, up-and-coming, very grateful female artist. . . Mary Mooney.