“I Know What I Am: The Life and Times of Artemisia Gentileschi” is a Masterful Graphic Novel

My earliest memories of seeing Artemisia Gentileschi’s incredible paintings were in high school while fooling around and looking in dusty books. But it is later, not too much later in an art appreciation class in college (taught by a female professor) when I began to really pay more attention to her body of work. It is also during that time when a clarity was revealed to me when I saw the power presented in the canvases she’d left behind…from then, Artemisia Gentileschi became an artist in my eyes, a woman who created some of my favorite illustrative examples of depicting female rage in such a powerful and authentic way. Yet, there is not much to read about her in the academic and much less in the comics and graphic novel world, sadly. Then, I Know What I Am: The Life and Times of Artemisia Gentileschi appears for me. When I heard Fantagraphics was putting out a graphic novel on the life of this incredible woman who fearlessly strived to make a name for herself in the male dominated world of painting in an era where women had way less rights and positions of power, with a female artist attached—I gladly wanted to read and review it. I walked into reading this with an expectation of getting a much more in-depth feel of who this woman was. I finished reading and left with a much greater understanding of the world she was born into and how she navigated it sometimes thriving, sometimes struggling but living a full and detailed life of knowing who she was and being able to chan…