The Creatrix, as a definable character in art, has now developed out of Neo-Romanticism. The Creatrix is a female artist who embodies the self-determination, autonomy, and complex sense of individuality which tends to manifest in Neo-Ro, and Neo-Ro creations. I am taking for granted that the Creatrix, as a definable art-character, does begin with Abby Heller-Burnham, Mary Evelyn Harju, and Jenny Kanzler. What distinguishes the Creatrix from post-modern female, and feminist, archetypes, is a sense of Eros, or the erotic, developed itself to an extreme pitch of intensity. This, even in Kanzler, where this development is stunted or warped into mutant form. The sense of the erotic is grasped, felt, and registered with emotions consonant with an integration not found in post-modernity: straightforward passion, straightforward longing, straightforward physical need, conveyed in a fashion which does not need to abuse the viewer with the dull, dispossessed ironies which have now become a post-modern tradition. Why Eros in American art can be made new now, especially with Heller-Burnham’s immersion in queer life, is that Eros in American art has never had formal parameters imposed on it, by painters who are not merely servants, but masters, of formality, on a level with classicist Europe. This is not to say that the Creatrix has to be a painter. But, if we are to start with Heller-Burnham, Harju, and Kanzler as initial archetypes, these are some reference points which might be of service to us, in an effort not to be strained by an atmosphere in which narratives of form, and narratives of passion, are disavowed.
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