Creativity Quote by Lee Krasner

Restlessness reads as a moral position here, not a stylistic preference. When Lee Krasner says she can’t understand the artist whose image never changes, she’s taking a swipe at the cozy myth of the “signature style” as destiny. In the midcentury American art world, an instantly recognizable look wasn’t just an aesthetic; it was a brand asset, a market logic, a way for galleries and collectors to stabilize value. Krasner’s line refuses that bargain. The inability to “understand” is pointed: it frames stasis as a kind of failure of attention, as if an unchanging image signals an artist who’s stopped looking hard enough at the world - or at themselves.

The subtext is also personal. Krasner lived in the shadow of Abstract Expressionism’s macho canon and, more specifically, Jackson Pollock’s gravitational legend. For a woman painter in that scene, being legible could be a trap: once critics decided what you “were,” deviation read as inconsistency rather than evolution. Krasner’s own practice moved through collage, dense all-over painting, and reworked fragments of earlier work - a career built on revision, destruction, and reinvention. Change wasn’t a phase; it was the method.

The phrasing matters: “image,” not “work.” She’s diagnosing the public-facing self an artist projects and others consume. To keep the image fixed is to cooperate with an audience’s desire for repeatable pleasure. Krasner’s skepticism insists that real artistic life is metabolizing experience, not reproducing a product. In a culture that rewards coherence, she argues for the messier kind: growth.