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Most artists will agree with Pablo Picasso's "I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them." For the artists, women have been a constant subject in their works.

Remembering an encounter with two artists, Segun Adejumo and Kelechi Amadi-Obi on this issue about women. They both had different reasons of portraying them.

For Adejumo, he is fascinated about the way women tie their head-scarf as is shown in his paintings. He says he appreciates women and the culture they represent, "It is beautiful and catches my attention. I love their fantastic head-tie, how women come together and put those things together. It is unbelievable and I think it is a work of art." Adejumo continues, "that brings my attention on women. You would notice that the attention is always on their head-ties, form of clothing and attitude."

In Amadi-Obi's paintings, it is obvious that the pose (of a woman) especially the hands, hair and draperies fascinates him. The way he makes these paintings speak for themselves. They translate their messages sharply to the viewers. Asked what motivates him into painting his figures, he analyses that he likes to "explore the figure and the pose as a means of expression a lot not the face necessarily. I believe that somebody with her hand on her chin says a lot about sadness. Another with her arm on her waist says a lot about defiance and one with head bowed down could depict sadness. I am captivated at the level of expression, pose alone could depict...trying to use the pose to express emotions...free flowing emotions, shyness, not really anger. Those emotions are better expressed by using a woman, because these are the emotions that men are discouraged from expressing." Adding that "these paintings for me are not necessarily women's emotions but then you feel them better when you are looking at the female because they are freer with their expressions. " Again why does he paint almost nude figures? "People tend to shy away from the body, it is funny, because it is a thing of the mind...we haven't gotten to actually appreciate the body itself as a work of art. For me, sometimes clothes can get in the way, and sometimes clothes can tell a different story, the purity of the nude completely simplifies and makes you concentrate on the pose itself, which is what I want you to look at, the pose Of course, it is impossible to control the way people will look at it ."

It is obvious that women depict the innermost emotion of the male artist, thus he uses her as his subject in his work.

Picasso was a man well-known for his art, women and the female nude was his obsessive subject. Picasso was famous for his liaisons with women throughout his life.

Everything in his pictorial universe, especially after 1920, seemed related to the naked bodies of women. Picasso imposed on them a load of feeling, which sets in differently ranging from dreamy eroticism (as in some of his paintings of his mistress Marie-Therese Walter in the '30s) to a sardonic but frenzied hostility, that no Western artist had made them carry before. He did this through metamorphosis, recomposing the body as the shape of his fantasies of possession and of his sexual terrors.

While still in his twenties, but finally over his self-pitying Blue and Rose periods, Picasso fundamentally changed cognitive reality with a work his friends called Les Demoiselles d'Avignon after a notorious place of prostitution. These demoiselles are indeed prostitutes, but their initial viewers recoiled from their advances with horror. This is the one inevitable image with which a discussion of 20th-century art must be concerned. It was the first of what would be called the Cubist works, though the boiled pink color of the hideous young women is far removed from later Cubism, with its infinite subtleties of grey and brown. It is almost impossible to overestimate the importance of this picture and the profound effect it had on art subsequently. The abstract heads of the figures are as a result of Picasso's recent exposure to African tribal art, but it is what he does with their heads- the wild, almost reckless freedom with which he incorporates them into his own personal vision and frees them to serve his psychic needs- that gives the picture its awesome force.

Whether he did this consciously or not we do not know, since he was a supremely macho man: Les Demoiselles makes visible his intense fear of women, his need to dominate and distort them. "To displace," as Picasso described the process of distorting their bodies.

At first Picasso did not dare to show it even to his admirers, of whom there were always many, his fear and possibility dislike of women which he tried to overcome and also overpower through his intense relationship with them both in his work of art and personal life. He might have succeeded in distorting them but did Picasso have the final victory?

Another work of art which has continued to thrill the viewer is Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa. It is the portrait of a Florentine lady whose name was Lisa. According to E. H Gombrich, an art critic, he describes the work as "A fame as great as that of Leonardo's 'Mona Lisa' is not an unmixed blessing for a work of art. We become so used to seeing it on picture postcards, and even advertisements, that we find it difficult to see it with fresh eyes as the painting by a real man portraying a real woman of flesh and blood. But it is worth while to forget what we know, or believe we know, about the picture, and to look at it as if we were the first people ever to set eyes on it. What strikes us first is the amazing degree to which Lisa looks alive. She really seems to look at us and to have a mind of her own. Like a living being, she seems to change before our eyes and to look a little different every time we come back to her. Even in photographs of the picture we experience this strange effect, but in front of the original in the Louvre it is almost uncanny. Sometimes she seems to mock at us, and then again we seem to catch something like sadness in her smile. All this sounds rather mysterious, and so it is; that is so often the effect of a great work of art."

Another work, Anyanwu, by the late renowned artist, Ben Enwonwu shows fluidity and movement. Anyanwu, a sculpture at the National Museum of Monument, Onikan in Lagos greets one at the front of the building. The slender and elongated sculpture holds one transfixed with its out stretched hands. The female piece is most appropriate.

According to Enwonwu, he had a vision about this figure before its creation. In Ijele: Art eJournal of the African World Vol. 1, 2 (2000), Enwonwu describes the sculpture as "spiritual in conception, rhythmic in movement, simple in its elongated form, and three-dimensional in its architectural setting." Recollecting the conditions surrounding its conception/reception, Enwonwu stated that he received it in a dream. Just before dawn, in that narrow gap between dreaming and wakefulness, he "saw" a supple graceful female form arise out of the sun in a brilliant shower of light. The light-drenched figure rose gingerly, then majestically in full glory. From the distance, she arched towards him in a wide curvilinear sweep. Her slim upper frame loomed close up enabling him to apprehend the classic Ethiopianized features of the face. Decorative horizontal slats marked off the lower torso that receded in a curve into the horizon, and tapered off to a point. Because this had been how his most significant pieces have come to him, Enwonwu intuitively recognized the import of what he had seen.

The mystery surrounding the female figure is continually explored by male artists as they seek to discover and reveal a part of their emotions which only the female figure would fully explain.