Theorizing about women painters

I have wondered about this for years: i'm not aware of many women painters who are driven to paint - so driven that other parts of life are subsumed. I mean driven like Van Gogh was driven. That's why Louise Nevelson is one of my heroes. She knew what she wanted from when she was young. She was sidetracked temporarily by consenting to marry and have a child, but then she left the marriage - and the child - and spent the rest of her life doing whatever it took to keep on producing. She was driven. She didn't have a well-placed mentor like Georgia O'Keeffe did, she was on her own. I totally admire her. I wanted to be "an artist" when I was young, and spent hours drawing. But one of my teachers in high school didn't appreciate my stuff and had another favorite student, and it squelched me. My ego, or whatever, didn't survive. It was easy for me to do other things, since my ego wasn't tied up in those things. Through my life I've gone through phases of drawing, then doing no art, then taking another class, then doing nothing again. It wasn't until my kids were grown that I started producing fairly consistently. If you believe, as i do, that practice is a large part of "talent," I have a lot of catching up to do. Any comments on this would be welcome. In the meantime, here's another painting - this one is a view to the west from a friend's house, showing off the wonderful Puget Sound with the Olympic Mountains in the background. I love this area - but I grew up in Eastern Washington which has a totally different ambience - high, dry, spacious and dramatic in its own way. I'll be throwing in some of those kinds of landscapes too.

Here's a watercolor sketch

This was a quick study, done from a photograph.

For starters

I've been thinking about starting this for a long time - and what got me going was that I want to get some business cards made so I wanted to get my url for the cards. Whatever works. I've been painting for quite a long time, and drawing for my whole life. Now I've decided I need to get serious about marketing. I'll be having my work photographed in a couple of weeks. A big step for me. I'll be working on the blog little by little. I realize it's a bit bare-bones for the moment, cause I clicked the wrong key and seem to have chosen this bleakish format, but I'll tart it up as I go along.

So the main topics are painting and marketing. The two things are so different they're practically mutually exclusive. I'd so much rather paint, or even procrastinate about painting, than try to market my stuff - but I've gotta believe I can do it.

I do watercolor, pastels, and collages. Watercolor is fantastic, cause it's so hard to control, and sometimes you lose control and it's horrible and sometimes you lose control and it's better than you could have imagined. Pastels are the opposite: you lay it on and it stays exactly where you put it, and if it's right it's cause you had the control you needed and did it right. I do the collages because they're FUN. I started them because I had so many reject paintings lying around I thought I'd try to use them somehow. Then I found stuff everywhere I could slap down. One of my best "suppliers" is my eight-year-old granddaughter, Ellie, who's a great artist in her own right, and whose work I've borrowed for collages.