Creativity Quote by Lee Krasner

Krasner’s sentence has the plain, workmanlike rhythm of someone determined to demystify art. No romantic fog, no lone-genius mythology: a mural is a job, a “procedure,” a logistical operation with staffing levels, scale, and labor needs. That choice of diction matters. Coming from an artist who moved through the testosterone-heavy ecosystem of mid-century American painting, “procedure” is a quiet act of re-framing: the studio isn’t a shrine, it’s a workplace. Creativity here is inseparable from management.

The line also reveals how public art, especially mural programs tied to institutions and government funding, produced a different kind of authorship. Murals weren’t just paintings; they were infrastructure. You had timelines, walls that didn’t forgive mistakes, and the pressure of visibility. Assistants weren’t a luxury, they were the means by which a single name could meet public expectations. Krasner’s calm arithmetic (“two to ten”) punctures the idea that scale equals solitary virtuosity.

Then there’s the sly, consequential correction: “or she needed.” It lands almost as an afterthought, but it’s the point. Krasner inserts women into a system that routinely wrote them out, refusing the default “he” without turning the sentence into a manifesto. The subtext is both practical and political: if art is labor, then access to labor (to assistants, to commissions, to institutional trust) becomes the real battleground. By describing the mechanics, she exposes the gatekeeping. The mural is a wall; the process is the map of who gets to paint it.