Context matters!
Immediately, when I think of context mattering, I think of women and art. Why are there no female equivalents to the male giants of Western art? Why are there so few women comparable to the towering male artists in our local and regional contexts? Why? Historically, the opportunities to develop talent that were afforded to one were not afforded to the other. Girls of Leonardo’s time could not apprentice with a master artist unless their father was a forward-thinking master artist himself. And even in such a context they were restricted in the techniques they could learn and the skills they could develop – no fresco painting and no study of the male or female nude. Thus, at a time when fresco paintings that included figures helped to establish an artist’s worth and stature, these avenues for asserting one’s depth of skill were not available to women.
