Jennifer Higgie > Quotes

“Yet to experience wonder take time and most of lead lives that leave little room for the solitude needed to explore the parts of ourselves that are intangible or inarticulate. We live in a world that insists we explain from the time we are teenagers: What do we want? How might we achieve it? For an artist to teach at graduate level, in many countries they’re not required to have a PhD, a depressing state of affairs: to bureaucratise the arts is to shackle the wild roaming that imaginations are capable of. Why isn’t professional practice as an artist considered a qualification in itself? Over the past century, works of great innovation have emerged in response to swift change. None of it was created because it was a formal requirement. To demand a very particular kind of artistic engagement in order to allow something or someone into the hallowed halls of art history is to deny creativity its often eccentric lifeblood.”
― Jennifer Higgie, The Other Side: A Journey into Women, Art and the Spirit World

“As psychoanalysis has made so clear, human beings move through life dictated to by a mess of conscious and unconscious memories, acts and feelings. The language of art is a reflection of this: it’s one of slippages, ambiguities and contradictions that are communicated via images, which are, by their very nature, indeterminate.”
― Jennifer Higgie, The Mirror and the Palette

“Tassi was eventually found guilty of the rape of a virgin. He was held in prison for eight months and exiled from Rome for five years, but as he was close to the Pope and his nephew, this was never enforced. The trial didn’t seem to have affected his career: he was commissioned to paint murals in the Pallavicini-Rospigliosi”
― Jennifer Higgie, The Mirror and the Palette

“in many cultures, mirrors were believed to be magical objects that granted access to supernatural knowledge.”
― Jennifer Higgie, The Mirror and the Palette

“The fear abounded that once they were allowed into the art schools, who knew where it would end: their demands for equality were understood to be akin to anarchism, socialism, vegetarianism and atheism.”
― Jennifer Higgie, The Mirror and the Palette

“If it is true that this is the first portrait of an artist at work, it could be because she came from the northern tradition which specialized in depictions of St Luke painting the Virgin, and she had the wit to adapt this example of a working artist for herself.”
― Jennifer Higgie, The Mirror and the Palette

“The day my daughter was born, I was still in the studio, trying to work on my Venus Binding the Wings of Cupid in the intervals between labour pains.”
― Jennifer Higgie, The Mirror and the Palette

“This outrageous new fashion became known as chemise à la reine but its impact was much darker than its airy appearance might suggest. Silk was the fabric worn by aristocrats: cotton was considered a working-class, English material as, at the time, it was mainly supplied by the British-owned East India Company. Unwittingly, Elisabeth not only had depicted her queen in both a louche and an unpatriotic light but had also boosted the slave trade as demand for cotton increased.”
― Jennifer Higgie, The Mirror and the Palette

“However, in 1774, when she was nineteen, her materials were confiscated by government authorities. They had caught wind of the young artist’s success; it was illegal to work as an artist without guild or academy membership – something that, as a woman, was very difficult to achieve.”
― Jennifer Higgie, The Mirror and the Palette

“To put the ensuing craze for mirrors in perspective: in the early sixteenth century an elaborate Venetian mirror was more valuable than a painting by one of the giants of the Renaissance, Raphael, and at the end of the seventeenth century, in France, the Countess of Fiesque swapped a piece of land for a mirror. In 1684 the Hall of Mirrors was completed at the Palace of Versailles: it was comprised of more than 300 panes of mirrored glass, so that royalty could see their glory reflected seemingly to infinity.”
― Jennifer Higgie, The Mirror and the Palette

“Throughout her life Sofonisba enjoyed teaching and this small drawing could be read as a testament to the joy it gave her.”
― Jennifer Higgie, The Mirror and the Palette

“It can be a site of reverie or rebellion; a form of propaganda or an idiosyncratic way of responding to the world: its openness to what it can be is one of its – if not its greatest – sources of power. It can be a response to anything and made anywhere by anyone: it can give permission to the silenced to speak or create a lexicon for the illiterate; it can lend the world shape and make it graspable to those who feel that it is out of reach.”
― Jennifer Higgie, The Mirror and the Palette

“a display of teeth and a hint of joy or hilarity suggested the subject was ‘plebeian, insane (or at least not in rational control) or else in the grip of some particularly powerful passion’.”
― Jennifer Higgie, The Mirror and the Palette

“Everything she did, even paintings without any humans in them, can be read as a variation on a self-portrait – they’re all reflections of her inner world, a place of acute sensitivity not only to the people but to the places she came into contact with.”
― Jennifer Higgie, The Mirror and the Palette

“If she had access to a mirror, a palette, an easel and paint, a woman could endlessly reflect on her face, and, by extension, her place in the world.”
― Jennifer Higgie, The Mirror and the Palette

“To express your sense of place in the world is, it would seem, an endless act of translation. A self-portrait is not always a depiction of a body.”
― Jennifer Higgie, The Mirror and the Palette