Mrs. Johnson (1950)

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    "I am always under awful tension when a lady sits for her portrait. I feel I am imposing too much when I ask her to sit this way or that in attempting to get a view that would be more picturesque. So I do not ask these things and my portraits of ladies start very badly. However, if the lady has a natural way of sitting interestingly, not merely plopped onto a seat, I am thrilled to draw her. But I fear my enthusiasm, which would exaggerate her features and displease her. My tendency to monumentalize, hence make more masculine, would be a fatal offense to her marvelous femininity. So I usually refrain from using women in my works. While I have always thought mostly of them as a form of escapism from the trivia of daily life and would rather commit suicide than be without their presence in this world, I furthermore exclude them from my creative deeds, because the subjects I carve or paint often deal with Death and Enslavement of Humanity by the Sneak-Predators, and it is too solemn and grievous a world of my mind's preoccupation to have their adorable company so misused and abused."