She was a teenager by artist Charles Navad and she has studied with some of the best contemporary figurative artists. Her work focuses on human figure and portraits. I'm sure that you have all seen some examples of her portraits. And if you didn't pick one up already, she does have a card over there that you could take. She was inspired by the tradition of classical Renaissance art as well as 19th century European figurative painters. The focus of her work and of her life is people and her art is about capturing the person in the portrait. Her passion is to answer the questions. What makes each of us unique? What is it about a face that tells a person's story? And I'm sure that you have seen that she did a very important local commission, which was the official portrait of Governor Peter Sumblin, and that is on one of her handouts. So I will give to you August Burns, now that Joyce Cahn is here. Well, hello and welcome. What a joy to see all of you here. It's really heartwarming and so many familiar faces. So thank you and thank you for coming. So what I'm talking about today is where are all the great women artists? They are in the basements, but they're coming up and that's what's really great. So when Grace asked me to do this, I think I couldn't even remember what she had asked me. It was a long time ago and I was like, I think it's something about art history and women has to be about women if she's asking me. But I'm not an art historian at all and women in art history would take about a year at least to really go through. So I wanted to just talk a little bit about how I got interested in this subject and give you some of my thoughts on women in art history. So it's really based around, sort of my starting point was Linda Nauchlin's 1971 essay on why have there been no great women artists. Good question, right? So we're going to talk a little bit about that. We're going to also ponder the very idea of greatness and how this all impacts women artists. So Grace gave you a bit of an introduction. I'm August Burns and many of you may know me. Now as an artist it always sort of surprises me when they say, oh, you're August Burns the artist. And I go, no, I'm August Burns the midwife and the women's health provider for decades. And I did international women's health. But I was a budding artist as a teenager. And like many, many people, people always do these funny bios of artists where it says I started drawing at a very early age. And I always laugh when I see that because everyone draws when it's early. It's when you stop, that you stop being an artist, right? You know, it's like you can't draw. Anyway, I had the great good fortune as Grace mentioned of being mentored by an artist who did not really want to teach me.  But he gave me the foundation in classical painting. I then went off to art school and got hit with abstract expressionism and the de-skilling of art, which was what was happening in art schools. No skills. I quickly quit school and ended up in women's health. And I have had a long career in women's health, which has taken me to 27 countries. And I've really had the opportunity to sit face-to-face with women whose gender bias totally affects their life, their potential and often impacts their very lives. So for me, gender has been the overriding issue of my entire career. But about 12 years ago I got this moment and I said, I need art back in my life again. And so I took this little class with Grace and started painting. I hadn't done anything for 25 years. Five years ago I said, you know what, I could be good. And so I resigned from my beloved job. It was a tough decision. I retired into painting. And I thought this was going to be the hammock of my life. No one dies. No big decisions. No gender issues. Right? Girl was I wrong. I started looking for the great women artists. Okay, okay. So I need some inspiration. What are women doing? Let me look around. So I went into the galleries. There were some women in the galleries. I noticed that the fancier the gallery, the fewer women there were. The higher the price, the fewer women that there were. About 30% of gallery representation is of women. 70% men. So I started looking at magazines. The big stories were about men, but there were lots of advertisements for women painters. And so I decided to look in the great museums. So I went to the Met, the Bastion of Western art, right? And I looked for the women and I found them. There were lots of women on the walls. But not in the signatures. As a matter of fact, I learned that this is 2010. 2010, less than 4% of the artists in the modern art section. This is not the old, old stuff. We're done by women. And yet 76% of the nudes were female. So we know that men really like to paint naked women. Okay. So I used to roam the Met all the time as a teenager. I was an art baby. And I absolutely fell in love with paint. I just fell in love with all of it. But I never noticed that there weren't women. Did you? As a matter of fact, can you name three great women artists? Georgia O'Keeffe. Erica Sut. Okay. So we usually get three. It's Mary Cassatt, Frida Kahlo, and Georgia O'Keeffe, right? Can we name five? But if you don't know a lot of names of women artists, don't be surprised. There are many. There are many. And I'm glad that people know them. Most Americans who took art appreciation in college had Janssen's history of art. Did anybody know this book? Has anyone ever seen it? How many people had it? Did you study it? Yeah, right. Okay. That's where you would have learned about all those incredible women artists, right? So as of the 1985 edition of Janssen's, how many women do you think were in the 3,000 entries? Zero. Zero. Can you believe it? The three didn't even make it in. Janssen did not believe that women were capable of greatness. And he was the gatekeeper of art history in the United States. Right? That's powerful, isn't it? So does that mean there were no great women artists? No. We must know what greatness is, right? We must know greatness when we see it.  Here we go. Greatness is visible. We can see it. We know it. It's obvious, right? Okay. Can you tell me which of these paintings is great? Okay. So on the left, Del Greco. Who's heard of him? Okay. Who's heard of Lavinia Fontana? Okay. Great. She was incredibly famous in her time. Brilliant portraitist who did hundreds of famous portraits. I believe she was in the 1400s, 1500s around then. Okay. Here's two paintings. Same wonderful subject. Judith beheading her Halafernes. Beautifully painted. Which one's great? Right or left? So Artemisia Gentilesia. You may have heard of her. She's becoming more well-known now. Was lost to history for a very long time. They're both great. Which one's great? Right? Left? This is the fish of the brawn. Who's Alexander Roslin? Anyone know him? No. Now he made it into Janssen's, but she didn't. Just saying. Right? Right? You know? Okay. Horses and cows. Right? Okay. Which one's great? She is. The great Turner. Rosa Bonner. How many people have heard of Rosa? Now she's more famous than the others. Right? Partly because she painted male subjects. Right? More male. I mean this is a very, very masculine kind of painting. Here's another one. Pretty similar subject matter, wouldn't you say? Women with little low cut dresses and flowers in their hair. But you can tell greatness. So which one's great? Right? Left? Okay. So Degas and Eva Gonzalez. Who's heard of her? She was a famous impressionist. She was in the same group. She was as famous as the rest of them. Gone from history. Right? I really like her painting better. You know? Okay. And so to get away from figurative because we all know where a nose should go. One of these is considered great. Alexandra Ekster. She was a Russian artist. She painted at the same time as Kandinsky. She did not follow him. They were the same influences. Okay? And I'm not even going to talk about this. You know? It's like there's no way that you're going to tell me one is better than the other. But that's okay. So greatness is not obvious. Who was that last one? You want to know? Oh, I don't know. One was, what's his name? Yeah. Right? And the other one was not. So why don't we know about these obviously great women artists? Maybe we all need an eye test. Need our eyes examined. But anyway, I don't want to spend all my time grousing about the unfair treatment of women. We know that this has been going on for ever and that women are rising. So it's changing. We know that our contemporary brains have been trained to see women's work with less value. It's just we're still there. We're absolutely still there. Our task now is to reclaim women artists. To find them in the vaults and in the basements of museums around the world, which is what's happening, all these women's shows are happening and they actually have to get them out of the vaults. They have to get them out. They're in bad shape. They're being restored. It's amazing. We have to dust them off and we have to show them because we have to create a legacy for young artists, both male and female, to know of women's greatness and that women paint differently than men do, maybe, and maybe they don't. But we want to see what they're thinking and doing and creating as well. So there's thousands of wonderful painters that we don't know. I'm going to start with a few. I'm starting with this one. So she was an outstanding painter, well-known painter and sculptor, 1785. She was admitted to Paris' Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in 83. While her acceptance was significant and important at the time, a royal decree had capped the number of women who could be accepted to four. Because only four women were allowed on any one time, they had no access to the next step, which is to show your work in the Paris Salon. If you couldn't show your work, you were never going to be anyone. And there were thousands of paintings that got into the salon, or a thousand at a time. Women four, four, four. What she did was she painted her students into her painting that she put into the show. So she had three women in the show. And her students got into the show. So that now hangs in the Met. Next time you go, try to remember, take a look at it. Okay, so we're going to go to the next century. Paris is now the epicenter of the art world, and students are coming from all over. There were a thousand American students in Paris in the late 1800s, all studying. Students were mostly male. The academies were only open to men. Women could go their own expense and find a teacher that might teach them, but they weren't allowed to paint nude models. So that's the craft of figurative painting, is learning to do figure painting. They weren't allowed to do it against the law. It wasn't until the mid-century that the impressionists so started to take apart the whole French system, rigid system of training, painting, showing at the salon that it broke up, that system enough to make room for all these academies started to accept women, or a few actually started to accept women, partly to pay the bills. But also it was values were changing. So women were finally allowed then to paint. But they were still segregated from their male peers, and they were still not allowed to paint the nude, but they could have paint something that was discreetly covered. I'm going to talk about this era of greatness, that an amazing amount of incredible work came out of women artists in Paris. Between 1850 and 1900, there's a wonderful show that we went to at the Clark Museum last summer that was just magnificent, and it was one of the best shows I've seen, hands down. It was all painted in this period of time by a group of women from all over who came to Paris. So I'm going to share some of my favorites. So back to Rosa, and this really magnificent painting, and this was one of my early inspirations when I was a teenager and went to the Met. This is at the Met, you may see it. It is 20 feet long, I don't know, 12 feet long something. It's really an enormous painting. And if you don't know about Rosa, she was taught at home by her father from an early age. She was exhibiting in the Paris Salon by the time she was 19. She was a real prodigy, and her big interest was in painting animals, but she needed access to the animals. She couldn't go into the stockyards and dresses, you weren't allowed. So she had to petition the French government in order to allow her to wear pants because women were not allowed. It was against the law to wear pants, right?  You also needed, and I think, to paint in the museums because the dresses would get in the way. She never wore dresses again. She just stayed in pants. It was like, this works. She was the first woman to be admitted to the Legion of Honor, and she's now in the Met. I included this because there's a beautiful portrait of Rosa by one of her students, Anna Klumpke, who actually cared for her through her old age and is the person who really saved all of her work. I also think it's really good to start seeing women, seeing them, you know, put a face to these names. Regal Woman. Here's another one that I love. I have this book in the back of the room if anybody wants to look through it at the end. Marie-Bush Kirseff. Anybody ever hear of her? Yeah, no. Brilliant young woman, Ukrainian. She moved to Paris in order to study. Her family came with her because she was so amazing. She spoke Russian, French, English, Italian. She started out as a major singer, got tuberculosis, and had to quit. She painted at age 19. I think this is done when she was 21 or 22. I mean, she was an incredible painter. Another one of her paintings. She died at age 25 of tuberculosis. What she might have done in her career would have just been astounding, and she had a huge body of work at that period of time. Oh, another, yes, another one of hers. Beautiful, huh? She's sorry you missed that all that time. We're missing so much great art. Amelie Bury-Cerelle. Something like that. Born in Barcelona, she moved to France for the same reasons. She debuted at the Salon at age 25. She studied at the Julian Academy, which was the first academy to admit all women. It was where most of these women went to the Julian Academy. They had the sisterhood of being there together as well, but they were also segregated. I love this painting. Is this women in power, or is this women in power? It's just really a magnificent painting. If you look at the quality of the paint, this is my dream, is to paint like that. Power, right? These are not the women on the chess lounge in negligee that you see or nude. Women rarely lie around nude. I mean, I don't. Who does? Come on, admit it. You just sort of lounge. So she married Julian, the Julian Atelier, and she took on running the school after, you know, at that point. Who knows Cecilia Bow? She's fairly famous. Oh, one. Okay. Contemporary of, guess who? Does this remind you of anybody's work, Famous Men? Sergeant. Sergeant, right? She was considered to be on par with Sergeant. She was sort of famous in the United States and in Paris. Look at that. American, yes, born in Philadelphia. Is that magnificent? Look at those colors, you know? Is this white? Look at that. You know, you can just feel the paint. You can just feel it. She painted until she was 93. And I'm just going to read it. I have time, so this is great. I'm going to read a little bit of what she had to say. Or this paragraph here. She studied at the Julian Academy also, but that was after she had spent a lot of time in the Pennsylvania Academy in the United States as well. During her long productive life as an artist, she maintained her personal aesthetic and high standards against all distractions and countervailing forces. None of these women had children, by the way. She constantly struggled for perfection. A perfect technique. Okay, I will talk loud. Can everyone hear me? Okay, great. A perfect technique in anything, she stated in an interview, means that there has been no break in continuity between the conception and the act of performance. She summed up her driving work ethic. I can say this, when I attempt anything, I have a passionate determination to overcome every obstacle. And I do my own work with a refusal to accept defeat that might almost be called painful. Magnificent work.  She has a huge body of work. You do that if you live to be 93 and keep painting. Look at that.  This is called the end of childhood. Isn't that just... So that would be a boy. They end early. What years did she live? She was 1855 to 1942. Yep. Considered by some better than sergeant or cassette during her life. And we don't even know about her. We just don't even know about her. It breaks my heart. Louise Breslau. Do you love that?  No. Uh-uh. And this is the artist. That's Louise, right? And she and... I think that she and Marie Boshkirsev were arch-rivals. But I love this. It just is a wonderful moment and just beautifully done. And once again, they're just the paint. I just love the feeling of paint. She opened her own academy. She opened her own... She entered Paris alone at age 23. And she opened her own academy in Paris and she earned her living as a portraitist. When I saw this at the Paris show, this doesn't come close to touching it. These leaves of wheat were golden. They were gold. In just the most magnificent way. This whole feeling of this woman is just gorgeous. Who's heard of Aston Nordegaard? We must have an art historian here. Yeah, beautiful work. Absolutely beautiful work. Her life was really much more constrained. Her parents died when she was very, very young. She learned at school. She went off to Germany and France. She studied back in Norway. It was a harder push. It was not part of the culture to have the art and a woman as an artist. But she did paint many, many prominent society people, including Edward Munch, is that how you say it? And the King of Norway. Elizabeth Norris, one of my personal favorites from Cincinnati. Who has heard of Elizabeth Norris? Okay.  She was described by her contemporaries as the first woman painter of America, 1859, 1938. They were all the same age. They all came of age in their 20s and that late 1800s when society was opening up, opportunities were opening up for women before they started closing back down again. She was also called the Dean of American Women Painters in France, and she was one of the most eminent contemporary artists of her day. And we've never heard of her. Lost to history. Jensen looked at that and said, you know, it's just not great. These are not great. I'm sorry. These are the best resolutions I could find. But if you can look them up, you'll see the absolute stunning beauty. So how are women doing now? How are women doing now? This question for you. This is your third quiz. Better? We're doing better? Better than the late 1800s? No. I don't think so. You know, here's the scene. How are women doing as visual artists? Not too bad. We're half of them, right? That's what it should be, right? But gallery representation, major exhibitions, art sold at auction. Here we are. Yeah. Not so much, you know? And if you cannot show your work, you cannot become famous or well-known or sell your work. You can't show your work. You can't sell your work. So can you make a living as an artist? Women make... I'm going to make this up a little bit. It's about 45 cents on the dollar in the art world. One of the worst pay inequities in any industry. So is it a glass ceiling or is it just a thick layer of men? So it's time to reclaim our place. How many of you had the opportunity to come to the show last summer at the Helen Day Art Center? Good. A number of people here. So the name of the show was called Reclamation, and it was... I approached the Helen Day with the idea of doing a women-painting women's show as my response to the Me Too movement and women breaking through. Interestingly, I have enough time. I had proposed this to the Helen Day probably a number of years earlier, and I was told by the then male director, who I love very much, that they just didn't really do figurative work. So they got a new director who happened to be female and young, and I went to her, and I said, what do you think about this? And she said, yes. So, you know, if you don't get what you want, ask again. So the process of claiming something back or of reasserting a right, rescuing from error or returning to a rightful course, there couldn't be a better definition of what we need to be doing around women in art. Of claiming something back. You know, this isn't about women getting an opportunity to be artists. There are so many incredible artists. You can go back to any period of time and you will find, and women were famous, Artemisia Gentilici. She painted all through Europe. She was so well known. Same with Elizabeth Vichy Lebrun. She painted royalty throughout. And she was the court painter for Marie Antoinette. Right. She did many paintings of her and the children, but then she had to leave. So women are coming back. And I'm, the rest of this time, I'm just going to share with you some of my favorite contemporary painters. Some of them were in the show last summer, which was incredibly well attended. And enthusiastically, women drove in car loads from two or three hours away to see the show, which was really exciting. So I'm going to start with Gabriela Gonzalez de Loso. She's a native New Yorker of Cuban and Ecuadorian heritage. She grew up in an artful family. Mother's a poet. And she grew up going to the Met and looking at those very paintings. Guess which painting she looked at when she was a child? Yes. So what painting do you think she went to the Met and saw? Does anyone remember the painting we saw before? Yeah, I can't remember the name. What was her name? Yeah. The one of the artists and her two pupils that got into the salon, right? So this young woman, and this is the importance of legacy. You know, there's the male legacy, and we can talk about it. You know, we can talk about Michelangelo, and we can talk about Da Vinci, and all of them. And young males look at those and they understand it, and they think about those muscles and the movement, you know, and all of those things and the females they would love. And they paint like that. You know, we need that. So she saw it, and then she painted it. Right? There she is, the artist and her student. And that was the name of the original painting was the artist and her two students. I love that. Isn't that great? Yeah. Isn't that a great story? She does a lot of history paintings like that.  She's very, very well known in the Philadelphia area. She's a portraitist, has done many, many commissions of men mostly, I guess that's who gets portraits done. I love this painting. I think that is a perfect painting. It was in the show in Stowe. And if you could go there and go up to the colors of the paint, which are just not, not able to see here. This was a woman, she was on the streets in New York. She turned around and this woman was standing there and she was like, it's a painting. And she approached her. The woman did not want to be painted. They talked for a while. She came back to her, she got her name and she came back to her a number of times and she finally agreed. This is called the defiance of Arabists. Is anyone defiance of Arabists? Anyone know who Arabists? Death. So, yeah. Is that woman defiant? Is she lounging naked? Catherine Stone. Canadian painter. She's 30 years old. This is called The Shadow of My Hand. She's a beautiful painter. She does a lot of still life. Very, very classical style paintings. But look at that hair, you know. You just, you can touch this painting. It's just beautiful. I saw it down in Alexandria, Virginia. Fell in love with it. This is Erin Anderson. She was also in the show. She's a young painter from Pennsylvania area. I included it because there's, you know, this contemporary feel to it. I love the ambiguity of gender that women are projecting. It's so important for liberating us from the roles that we all get stuck in. So, and this is called The Candidate. And I don't know why, but it's intriguing. So she paints on copper. This is one of my all time favorites. This is by a painter named Aliyah Chapin. She's Seattle born. And these are her aunties.  So maybe, you know, they're still not lounging exactly, but. So this painting won the very prestigious, the biggest prize in figurative painting in the world. This was the winning painting for the London Portrait Gallery. It's called the BP Awards. And I think it's 37,000 pounds or something like that. She painted this in her early 20s. She paints a lot of naked people. This is Margaret Bolin, another one of my personal favorites on every level, and that she speaks to me in what she paints about. She does a lot of the idea of white face, the idea of some of her blue face or things thrown on people, is what society puts on us, right? This is a little girl that she painted a lot very close with her mother and family. And just has a store of things that the child is able to just pick out and dress herself up, and then Margaret does these paintings. These are enormous. I think this one is about, I don't know, nine feet. The other one, the one of Antis, I think is 20 feet long. So we're talking about big paintings. Yeah, you know, that's robust. Gosh, I didn't know women could do that. It's in New York City. Dominique Medici, New York and Seattle. This is just a different type of painting, so I added it as well. She was also in the show. She does a lot of these beautiful a la prima portraits. This was a two-hour painting, just paint. This is about paint, capturing the person in just beautiful paint. Alyssa Monks is someone that I studied with. You may have seen some of my paintings, particularly the one called Roller Derby Queen, that has many layers of paint on it. Some of them are very fluid. And Alyssa really experiments with paint and layering of paint. So this again is a very large painting. This is probably, I don't know, six feet by four feet, something like that. It probably might be about that size that it is. And it really explores. This was during a time when her mother was dying and she was very, very close to her mother. So she spent a lot of time in the woods and found refuge there. Does that speak to you about that? I think that it speaks beautifully to that feeling of the loneliness, the sadness, the woods, the comfort of it, the veil of it. It was just gorgeous, a gorgeous piece of work. How many just got a little bit more aware of their own bias in art through this small presentation? So check your own bias. Do you notice that you value it differently? If you go to a gallery, notice the numbers. And if you see some women's art and there's only a few of them, just let the gallery owner know that that's really what you're looking for. You'd love to see more. They're there to sell you art and then buy it. Buy art by women artists. That's how we can begin to make a living. And once you can make a living, then you're a professional. And then you're not this hobbyist, oh, she's a lady painter thing, right? And learn the names of some of these great women artists and, you know, just like surprise your friends, impress them at a dinner table. Next time, Leonardo comes up. Or what's his name, the guy with the paint? Jackson Pollock. Next time they come up, you could say, oh, do you know Elizabeth Norse? Oh my God, could she paint, right? You'll really impress them. You'll educate them. Their brains will expand because new information is good for us. Any questions? Yeah, so. There is now, at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, an exhibit of the artisans. This is where women are in the 20th century, the late recruiting, and people that I've never heard of and never seen. So it's really kind of an exciting thing for them. I can hear where you said it is. The Boston Museum of Art. There's one also at the National Museum of Art in Washington on women and Dutch painters. Dutch painters. There were many, many, many women who were famous Dutch painters. Many of their work, particularly in the marketplace, their names got taken off and it got attributed to a male who painted like them because the value, the resale value would go up if it was painted by a man. I'm not just excited about your talk about buying women or knowing women, but I encourage women to be artists and to explore the value of being in an activity that pulls on your creativity and challenges you, yourself. Yeah. As women, we've swallowed the manner... I'm going to... So she wasn't asking a question. She was suggesting that she was encouraging women to be artists, to go ahead and try something out and really experiment and feel your creativity. One of the things about art is that it's a two-second decision. You put your art up and somebody says, it's good, not good, right? It's like they don't have to read the page. They don't have to listen to the end of the song. They just look good, not good. And so a lot of people really shy away. People are really afraid to do drawing or painting of things that look like something. But it's all really learnable, isn't it? Fiona, my student is over there, Fiona has been studying with me for five years, and she's brilliant. August, I love your show and you're focused on portraiture. I wondered if you could comment on some... There's some women artists who are really commanding high, high prices of auction now. They're not figurative artists. That's how we think of them. Can you tell us, the one that comes immediately to mind is Cindy Sherman, and there are a number of others. And I wondered if you could comment, okay, given this environment that you very explicitly explore, how did those women get there? They just got there. So, you know... There's a difference between art as a commodity and art as a... I'm probably not the best person to talk about this. But there's a whole art market now that really doesn't have... It just ends up, it's about fame.  And now they're getting their due. What would you say, Dee Dee? Better if you're dead. That's right. Most women become famous after they're dead. So if I become famous, and you meet me somewhere afterwards, let me know. But I'm famous in my appeal here. That's pretty good. I'll solve the list of what to do. What to do? It's something that I'm up against all the time. I admire a little picture that a man had painted. I finally found a price thing which they don't have with them there. It was $10,000. Oh dear, I wonder price my painting by 10 times. Yes. And then both of my work and his work solved. And I have a cool amount here, it has $10,000 to paper a lot. A little bit of paper with marble stuck in it. And then apparently they said, lots of people do. And my painting just went away today. So it came from Connecticut and drove away with my painting. And I felt this horrible mixed feeling. Oh yes. I let something go for much less than the years I spent painting it. Right. And yet $1,000. Can I say no to $1,000? No, I can't say no. I've got to take that money to the grocery store. But we got $10,000 for the picture. But maybe it really has better than mine. Well, we could put them both up and we could do a little thing on things. So it would be like, well women are very apologetic also. It's changing. And hopefully the next generation will be marching out with very different attitudes. Sally. Questions about the art markets. A lot of those art markets are focused on design elements rather than painting. Yes. A lot of art market is for decor as well. And it's also what do you want to live with? You know, I have a hard time selling paintings because they're people. And it's like, I don't know that person. It's on my wall for a long time. You know, you might like that but you might not. So I do a lot of commission work. But people always ask the question is how long did that take you to make? You know, and you know the answer that most artists will give is a lifetime. You know, and so how do you price it? Because people say, how long did that take you? And you're selling that for $1,000? Well it took me two hours. Plus 30 years. Plus 30 years. But the next one took me a month. You know, do you want to pay for that one? And you can't probably tell the difference, you know. The whole experience of being in a painting and bringing it to where you wanted to go. Sometimes it just falls off my brush like somebody else. You know, like I am doing it. You know, like I just really know exactly what I'm doing. Or no. I don't even have to know. It just happens. It's like, oh, look at that. And other times it's like, look at that. My God, turn it upside down. Oh, the nose is on wrong, you know. So, you know, it really is, it's so variable. And there's lots of artists here who are trying to sell their work. And you know, we have a population that's not really looking to collect more stuff. So that is an issue. There's a lot of them. But, you know, certainly the gender one is definitely one. But, you know, look around. See what other people are charging for art. So go to galleries. Look what they're charging. Really give some really hard decision about whether yours is really as good as that. And then we'll give you a ballpark. And just go with it. And stay with it. You know, I just count my work when I'm ready for it to go somewhere else. But, you know, I don't otherwise. And it's like, so I get requests all the time. I give them my price list and I never hear back. And that's fine. You know, it's not outrageous. But, you know, it's not a few hundred dollars for a portrait that takes me a month. Yeah. I'm trying to get the faces that you know in your other life. When it's held alive. Come back and you paint them. Or do you always paint? Almost always paint from life. It's really different than painting from photographs. Or memory. You know, memory is really hard. You know. But, you know what it is about my past life. Is that I got to, this is the privilege of having been a midwife and a women's health provider. Is that I got to sit knee to knee with thousands of women. Hearing their stories and looking in their eyes. And I fall in love with everyone I paint. I just do. I see the magnificence of their face. And by the end of it I just, they are the most beautiful person I've ever seen. And that sounds, but it's really, really true.  How I feel about that painting. And sometimes it's really hard for me to let those paintings go. You know. And others are not quite like that. You know, they're still a joy to paint. But you know, there is this, it's intimate. You know, when do you get to stare someone in the eyes for hours? So tell me about yourself. You know, and we know that if you spend, what do they say if you spend four, four minutes staring into someone else's eyes, you'll fall in love. That there's just this human thing that happens and I get to do that. And can I talk about drawing Andrew's wife, Radune. I had the absolute privilege of doing a portrait of her and we came over to the house. We did some sketching, some photographs. And then I continued to work. But her portrait is at the North Branch Cafe. If you have a chance to go in and see it, it's just a pencil drawing. And it was just done as the, just as my study for the portrait. And you know, I just kept working on it. It was in the living room of my son's house, living there. And then I just stepped back saying, it's done. And I wrote and said, it's not going to get better. You know, this is her. And you know, and it feels that way every time I look at it. So yeah, it really is, it's very different than a photograph. I think. Anyway, yeah. So I think a lot of art workshops in my advanced age. If you need to leave, please go ahead. Yeah, if you don't want to hear from my advanced age comment. No, no. No, well here's my question. It has to do with gender. Why are 99% of the people in the workshop women? Right. I think that there's a flip side to all of this, right? Which is that I think that women have a lot more permission to just do art. And not feel like they need to be, you know. If a young man states, I'm an artist, he damn well better be pretty good, right? Or I mean, there is just, I think that there is that. I think that women can be like, I love art. And so I paint or I draw. And it's just different. I think that there is that. And so especially as we end up, as we're having more free time in our life and we put all our creativity into families, we start putting creativity into ourselves and exploring those places. And workshops is a really good way to do it. But it's light, you know. It's not like, this is my passion. This is what I have to do. I have nothing else. I remember what I read about Cecilia Boe perfectionism. She didn't let anything happen. Nothing got in the way of her painting. And that's a different, that's just, you know, it's different. So the flip side is that men don't get to dabble like that very much without somebody looking over their shoulder and going. Oh, sorry. I don't know if that's true. It's a huge generalization, but I think women, you know, at different times in their life, they have more time, resources, and are going to spend it on things that they enjoy. So, one more? Yeah, I'd like to suggest that we all could be consumers of women's art and advocates by asking our museums to put women's art on the wall. Yes, absolutely true.  And the reason that there's so many shows popping up, as a matter of fact, I heard that, you know, for the show down at the Clark, they had a really hard time accessing the paintings they wanted because there were so many women's shows happening around the world because there's a demand for it. There's a demand for it, they're going to meet that demand. Sometimes museums get surprises, because I know at the Guggenheim, they had the Home of On Flint show, and I talked to one of the people who had opened that show, and he said, this was a surprise for us. We said we would take it out of an old boy, good friend network with Stockholm, and then we were horrified about what we said yes to. We're going to have this woman unheard of woman who painted weird, mystical stuff in here, and what the hell. And then he said, we've never had such a successful show. Everybody has loved this show, and he's very open about it, and everyone has a different reason why they love it. And so I thought, well, maybe they want me to close next time. We are half the population. We really have something to say. Yeah. I had to demonstrate the downfall of women's in the arts, and that's picking up children. Yes. Yes. So none of those women had children. I think that's really interesting. That's where we pour our creativity. So anyway, thank you. Thank you.


Here's a program that prints a stage of life given an age. It's written as a series of independent unary if statements to test age ranges. Let's say I enter an age of 7. 7 is not less than 0, so I don't print that. 7 is not greater than or equal to 0 and less than 2, so I don't print infant. 7 is not greater than or equal to 2 and less than 4, so I skip the print on line 11. 7 is not greater than or equal to 4 and less than 6, so I skip the print on line 14. 7 is greater than or equal to 6 and less than 13, so I'm going to print out grade school. I continue on to the next if statement. 7 is not greater than 13 and less than 18, so I won't print teenager. 7 is not greater than or equal to 18, so I won't print legal adult. The only thing that I will print out is grade school and that's the correct thing. Let's run the script and view the shell and put in a 7 and sure enough it prints out grade school. There's nothing wrong with this program. It works exactly as advertised, but it could be improved. Notice that once we find out that the age is between 6 and 13, we don't need to do any of the other tests. This is a place where we'd like to use elses to save ourselves some computation. So let's rewrite it this way. If age is less than 0, that's not a valid age. Otherwise, let's test to see if it's greater than or equal to 0 and less than 2. If that's the case, we'll print infant. If that's not the case, then we nest yet another if statement and ask, well, is it greater than or equal to 2 and less than 4 and so on. I can nest my ifs inside of the else clauses and that will guarantee that only one of the ifs will be matched. There's some extra optimization that I can do here as well. If the age is not less than 0, let's say they entered 7, then I know for sure that it's not greater than or equal to 0, so I don't need this test at all. Similarly, if the age is 7, it's not less than 2, so I know it's greater than or equal to 2. In the else clause, there's no need for me to test that again. I could go through by hand and indent all of these, but to save a little bit of time, let me show you what this looks like when we're done. And here it is. Now if I enter a 7 for the age, it's not less than 0, 7 is not less than 2, it's not less than 4, it's not less than 6, but it is less than 13, which means we print grade school, and we skip this else, it's not needed. So our program is now a little bit more efficient. Let's run it and see that it works. Let's clear the shell, view it and run. And if the person is 7, they're in grade school. Again, the program works. There's nothing wrong with it. It's a little bit better than the previous version. The only problem we have now is that we're indenting and we're marching off the right-hand edge of the screen and it's hard to read and it could get confusing if we had more choices. There's a shortcut that you can use in Python. When an else is immediately followed by an if, you can combine them into the single keyword lif, and then I can unindent this. Here's another else that is followed immediately by an if, so I can combine those into lif and make sure my indentation is correct. The same with this else if can be combined into the keyword lif, and so on and so forth. Again, to save time I'm not going to do all of them. I'm going to show you what it looks like when it grows up. This is a lot more readable and it does the minimum amount of testing. Again, let's go with age 7. Is 7 less than 0? No. Well, otherwise if 7 is less than 2, which it isn't, otherwise if age is less than 4, otherwise else if age is less than 6, 7 is not less than 6, otherwise if age is less than 13, which it is, we print grade school, and then we can skip all the other lifs and elses. Let's view the shell, clear it, and run this version of the program, and again, a 7-year-old person is in grade school. The moral of the story, if you have a program with a chain of conditions, if some condition is true, otherwise if some other condition, otherwise if some other condition, otherwise if yet another condition, otherwise last case, you can take all the else ifs, and instead of having to indent them, you can combine them into lif, and then all your cases will line up nicely, your code will be more readable, and you can get away with a lot less computation to get the results you want.