A peek at my studio library of glorious art books
Explore some more of the art books that are fuelling my creativity lately. The catalogue from an exhibition about forgotten female Impressionists, a deep dive into my heroine: the rebellious Suzanne Valadon, and a fabulous collection of costume illustrations from Christian Lacroix.
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Something that's really important to me in my practice is books. I have a whole library in the studio of art books, and I pull them down often to inspire me, or when I'm feeling stuck, or when I'm not sure how to tackle something. Sometimes I just need to open a book, and it's like I need to paint right now. So I wanted to share a few with you today.
The first one was my birthday present a couple of weeks ago. My incredible husband had noticed me eyeing this up lustfully in several bookshops and decided to surprise me with it, which is amazing. There's another one in this series by Phaidon called "Great Women Artists", and that's also a fantastic book, but it has sculptures and all different other flavours of artists. As I'm a painter, painters are my jam. So this was exactly the right one, the one that I wanted.
It's a beautiful book, big hardcover, and basically what it has is every single page is an image and a little bit of blurb about a great female painter, or just a great painter. If you'll notice on the cover, the word "women" has been crossed out, which I really like. It's just a book of great painters.
You'll hear in my next podcast episode, which is coming out at the beginning of July, I talk with Carrie Brummer a lot about the way that women have been so poorly represented in art history. I have a degree in art history, like it's something that I studied at university. It's always been a particular special interest of mine, and I barely knew about any female artists. We weren't taught about them - there was such a big gaping hole in my education in this area.
So in the last 10 years or so, I've really worked to expand my knowledge of female artists and just get to know them, because they are so much more interesting than the guys. I mean, to the point now where I've sort of lost interest in male artists altogether. There are just so many interesting female artists in the world, and that's what I'm interested in, personally.
It was lovely to be able to kind of flick through this book and say, "Oh, I know a bit about her, and I know a bit about her," but my goal is to have some knowledge of every single one of these artists. Obviously, some of them are favourites. Look at the colours on that! Some of them will be more appealing to me than others, but I would like to know a little bit about every single one, and be able to talk about it.
Gwen John is an absolute favourite, and this book is a really good start. If you aren't aware of that many female artists, which I think people are more aware these days, but if you're struggling to name five female artists who were active before 1900, then this is a really good starting place where you can investigate all sorts of incredible women.
They're just so much more interesting than the men, I think probably because they've had to fight harder and they've had more difficult stuff to go through just existing in the world. I mean, I wish that they hadn't had to go through that stuff, but it does make them super duper interesting, and it makes their stories interesting, and I think it makes their art more interesting. Which is why, historically, so much of women's art has been appropriated by men and passed off as their own.
This book is a brilliant starting point, and I also recommend listening to the Great Women Artists podcast. It's really good to have on while you're in the studio. And I didn't pull this off the shelf because I wasn't going to talk about it today, but this is another really good grounding in feminist art history: "The Story of Art Without Men". So it's just the women, and it's amazing. This is my mission. I'm going to be going through this, deepening my education. There's so much good stuff there, highly recommended.
The next one I wanted to share is "Suzanne Valadon: Model, Painter, Rebel". Suzanne Valadon is one of my studio guardians. I think it might have been Barbara Sher who wrote about choosing a council of mentors - people who you didn't necessarily have to know, they could be living or dead or famous people, who were doing the things that you wanted to be doing, living the lives that you wanted to live. You were supposed to consult your council of mentors when you came across a difficult situation, like "What would Suzanne Valadon do in this particular situation?" It's supposed to inspire you and help give you a different perspective.
For me, Suzanne Valadon is firmly in that council. I even have a photograph of her in the studio above my desk, kind of looking down on me. Her and Yayoi Kusama, who is another one. Both of these women are incredible artists, but they also just did their own thing. They did what they weren't supposed to do, and they found a way to exist in the world that worked for them. I'm always looking for stories like that. As a neurodivergent woman, as somebody who has had difficulty in the past with finding my place in the world and carving my own path, women like this really paved the way for me.
This book in particular, I think, was the exhibition catalogue for an exhibition of Valadon's work that was on at the Glyptotek here in Copenhagen a few years ago. I just adore her work. Not only is she a wonderful painter, she was also just really sure of who she was and what she wanted, and it definitely wasn't to be a nice, polite society lady or follow any kind of groove that society had laid down for her.
She started out as a circus performer. She was very acrobatic. After being an absolute terror as a child - she was so naughty and constantly running away from school - she went to a school that was run by nuns, I think, if I remember rightly. She just constantly flouted their conventions and expectations, and she was uncontainable.
After her time as a circus performer, she had a fall and injured herself very badly, so she couldn't do that anymore. She then decided to become an artist's model. She ended up modelling for Degas, I think, to start with, and then Renoir. She was one of the most famous models, and used her time as a model to learn all about painting and drawing.
Just look at the colours she uses. She's such an incredible painter. The way that she uses colour is so modern, but also very much of its time. I have prints of her work hanging up in my house. I love a Suzanne Valadon original - that'd be incredible.
If you don't know about her, she's not only a brilliant painter and worth looking into from an artistic perspective, but she's also got a cracking good story. There's a brilliant biography of her called "Renoir's Dancer: The Secret Life of Suzanne Valadon" by Catherine Hewitt. That's got a fantastic account of her life, the environment she was growing up in, how she came to be a painter, her family difficulties, and the unconventional way that she managed her life.
Suzanne Valadon is a constant source of inspiration for me. I reach for this book often.
Okay, we're sticking with the theme of women for the moment. This is another exhibition that I just went to see very recently, and it was actually in a place with beautiful gardens that looked like an Impressionist painting. It was absolutely stunning and really added to the atmosphere of the exhibition.
The exhibition was called "Impressionism and its Overlooked Women". As you might have realised by now, women in art are kind of my thing, and this was fabulous. It was incredible to see these paintings in real life. I set the alarm off a couple of times just because I was trying to press my nose up against them. I have a really tactile sensory connection with paintings, and I always want to rub my nose up against them and see how they're made, what brushstrokes they're using, why they've done it that way, why they've made this choice and not that choice.
It was billed as "The Forgotten Women of Impressionism", but the vast majority of the exhibition was made up of works by Berthe Morisot, who was one of the few female founders of Impressionism. So she's hardly forgotten - she's probably the one that most people have heard of. But it was lovely to see those paintings in the flesh.
The exhibition featured five or six women. We had Berthe Morisot, then Mary Cassatt, who I sort of tangentially knew about, but I definitely want to look up more about her. She was cracking, and also she seems like she might have been a bit of a weirdo. And I'm always drawn to people who seem like they might be a bit weird. She never had children. The way that she made art was kind of pushing the boundaries a lot more - she was doing some really interesting stuff with printmaking and experimenting.
Then there was Eva Gonzalez. It was all very pretty, but it didn't exactly light a fire under me. You know, respect.
We also had Marie Bracquemond, who's an exquisite draftswoman. There's a self-portrait in here which kind of knocks your socks off. Seeing this in the flesh was incredible. Her eyes and her expression - she just kind of gazes at you from the canvas. It's unapologetic and wonderful. You can really get a sense of the person behind the portrait.
And Marie Bashkirtseff - they had some extracts from her journal laid out on a plinth. I've read extracts of it before, and she was an absolute firecracker. She was obsessed with getting famous, she was endlessly frustrated at not being allowed out to go and paint the way that she wanted to. She wanted to go out into the world and observe people and paint on location. And of course, she couldn't do any of that because of the time, you know, without a chaperone. She just kind of railed against it.
It really made me think, what incredible things could these women have accomplished had they not been so constrained by society? Any woman that we have heard of in art history has done so against incredible odds. It's really amazing. I can't wait to get Bashkirtseff's journal and read it, because I think the whole thing will be amazing. And her painting is stunning as well - really beautiful, really interesting.
The exhibition catalogue has a little essay about each one of the women, and then it's got the catalogue itself. There were some Manet paintings, I think, which is a bit like... I mean, I understand they have to contextualise these things. But if it's an exhibition about forgotten women, and right at the beginning, you have a bunch of paintings by men, it kind of felt a bit like, "All right, whatever." But yeah, they had a whole bunch of stuff by actual women, which was amazing.
The catalogue has beautiful paintings with beautiful light, really lovely work. Some of it is just so incredibly detailed. It was wonderful to see the brush strokes up close. I really love this one by Mary Cassatt - I sat in front of it for about 20 minutes just staring at it. So good.
Now, we're just going to take a little foray into something completely different. We have a second-hand bookshop pretty much right outside our front door, and they do these Dutch auctions where the price starts at about 150 kroner (about $20) and then gradually goes down every couple of days. It's fun, sort of playing chicken with the books, because the good stuff is more expensive, but it maybe goes a bit faster. And then eventually you get down to like 50p or something. Sometimes you get a bargain, sometimes all the good stuff's gone.
I found this book there, and it's in French. Unfortunately, I would love to read it. My French is maybe not that good, but maybe if I read it, my French would improve as well. It's about Christian Lacroix, the fashion designer, and this is particularly about his work as a costumer for theatrical performances. I think it's specifically the opera Don Giovanni, but it's just his illustrations. Look at these - they're amazing. There are illustrations, photos of the final costumes, pages from his sketchbook. There's a section on opera, so it's all sorts of theatrical performances, and they are utterly bonkers and utterly beautiful.
If you've watched any of my videos, you know that black and white stripes are a thing that I wear a lot. It's kind of an obsession. I really want to draw this image. It's just an absolutely beautiful book, really inspiring. I always love seeing how fashion designers and textile artists use sketchbooks.
If you watched my 2024 goals video, you'll know that I have a secret desire to design some fabrics and team up with a fashion designer to make some clothes. I love fashion. I love clothes. And so this kind of tickles that part of me, as well as being just amazingly illustrated - these are amazing illustrations in themselves.
I don't know if this book is available in English, but even just having it for the pictures, even if you don't understand a word of French, it's so worth it. And if you've ever been interested in doing fashion illustration, or you just like to see how the fashion sausage is made, then yeah, well worth a look. I love all this detail and the handwriting and the scribbles - it's just an absolute delight.
So there we go. That's a few books that I have been pulling down off the studio library shelves recently. I hope you enjoyed this little walkthrough with me. Go buy books and I'll see you in the next video. Bye!
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