Eleanor Munro

From Procedural Notes, 1979:

"I had two interests in doing this book: one biographical or psychological, the other esthetic. I welcomed the chance to study the lives of a number of successful women artists...to show with what inner-directed commitment and sacrifice they kept to their goal long before success was a factor, and so possibly to offer models for other people (female and male) who find many of our society's goals inadequate. At the same time I hoped to illuminate the work itself in an unconventional way...to explore to what degree the work had been drawn from commonly comprehensible life experience and so might be susceptible of interpretation along humanist lines."

From Afterword, 2000:

"Back in '79 it seemed to me that women artists nurtured in isolation or political solidarity possessed a special empathy with the natural continuum, and I envisioned that gift realizing itself in a movement of selfless humanism...[however], the empowered artist today, for the most part and justly, wants personal gratification from her public career and so shapes her expressions of gendered sensibility..for the open market. All the same, it interests me that the timeless subject of people's need for solace against loss still drives strong artists to seek visual metaphors for survival."