Opinion,  Wide Awoke,  Women

‘Wide Awoke’- Are Female Artists Worth Collecting? with Lynette Sheppard from Hawaii, United States

Three weeks ago, we announced our brand new ‘Women’ section within TheAppWhisperer and we kicked off with our first ‘Talking Points’ with the incredibly talented mobile artist, M. Cecilia Sao Thiago, where she visually channeled the creative argument of ‘what if I wasn’t me?’, envisaging herself as an artist whilst physically being a male, as opposed to female. If you missed that, please go here.  Following that we published the first in our Women’s ‘Wide Awoke’ section with Armineh Hovanesian (see here). Last week we published our second instalment to this series with Deborah McMillion (see here).

For our Wide Awoke section initially we selected a challenging discussion at the Tate Museum, London. Recently an article was published in The Guardian, by Helen Gorrill, suggesting that female artists are less likely to succeed now, than they were in the 1990s. Gorrill expressed “Today, when men’s artwork is signed, it goes up in value; conversely when work by women is signed, it goes down in value, and the addition of a woman’s signature can devalue artwork to the extent that female artists are more likely to leave their work unsigned”. And even more scathingly, “The Tate seems to align to these views by only collecting a ‘token’ proportion of work by women, who form the 74% majority of fine art graduates”, Gorrill goes on to say.

This of course, provoked much discussion here at TheAppWhisperer HQ, after all, this is one of the key elements to our new Women section, we want to drag out all these issues and more into the open.

We approached several female mobile artists and asked them this question ‘Are Female Artists Worth Collecting?’ and asked them to create a short video of their answer to our subheading of this section ‘Wide Awoke’. Today, we are incredibly proud to publish the third in this series by none other, than highly sought after female artist, Lynette Sheppard from Hawaii, US.

We really hope you enjoy this new section and of course, please feel free to leave comments below, this is a section about Womens issues but we invite all men to view and participate in commenting too.

©Lynette Sheppard

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Joanne Carter, creator of the world’s most popular mobile photography and art website— TheAppWhisperer.com— TheAppWhisperer platform has been a pivotal cyberspace for mobile artists of all abilities to learn about, to explore, to celebrate and to share mobile artworks. Joanne’s compassion, inclusivity, and humility are hallmarks in all that she does, and is particularly evident in the platform she has built. In her words, “We all have the potential to remove ourselves from the centre of any circle and to expand a sphere of compassion outward; to include everyone interested in mobile art, ensuring every artist is within reach”, she has said. Promotion of mobile artists and the art form as a primary medium in today’s art world, has become her life’s focus. She has presented lectures bolstering mobile artists and their art from as far away as the Museum of Art in Seoul, South Korea to closer to her home in the UK at Focus on Imaging. Her experience as a jurist for mobile art competitions includes: Portugal, Canada, US, S Korea, UK and Italy. And her travels pioneering the breadth of mobile art includes key events in: Frankfurt, Naples, Amalfi Coast, Paris, Brazil, London. Pioneering the world’s first mobile art online gallery - TheAppWhispererPrintSales.com has extended her reach even further, shipping from London, UK to clients in the US, Europe and The Far East to a global group of collectors looking for exclusive art to hang in their homes and offices. The online gallery specialises in prints for discerning collectors of unique, previously unseen signed limited edition art. Her journey towards becoming The App Whisperer, includes (but is not limited to) working for a paparazzi photo agency for several years and as a deputy editor for a photo print magazine. Her own freelance photographic journalistic work is also widely acclaimed. She has been published extensively both within the UK and the US in national and international titles. These include The Times, The Sunday Times, The Guardian, Popular Photography & Imaging, dpreview, NikonPro, Which? and more recently with the BBC as a Contributor, Columnist at Vogue Italia and Contributing Editor at LensCulture. Her professional photography has also been widely exhibited throughout Europe, including Italy, Portugal and the UK. She is currently writing several books, all related to mobile art and is always open to requests for new commissions for either writing or photography projects or a combination of both. Please contact her at: [email protected]