Having grown up in a fairly remote part of Scotland, Victoria has always been inspired by wild, untouched, lonely landscapes. She studied painting at The City and Guilds of London Art School, leaving with the Thomas Girtin water colour prize. After graduation her wanderlust took her through Asia, and eschewing a camera, she recorded her travels with a sketch book and watercolours.
Whilst living in London, she had works accepted for the for the Discerning eye by Gillian Ayers, Sir Brinsley Ford and William Bowyer. The chairman of judges, Evelyn Joll, bought her painting when she entered it to the "The Sunday times water colour competition". After, when living in Scotland she won the Bank of Scotland "Banking on Art Prize", then lived in Somerset, and Morocco. For the last ten years she has been settled in Southern Spain where she has been successfully exhibiting and won the 33rd Gibraltar international Art competition. Victoria had her first solo London exhibition "Light on Andalusia" two years ago with Panter and Hall and has now turned her attention to painting the landscape of her childhood. She has works in many private collections and now wants to return to live and work in the UK.
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Artist's Statment: 2012
SCOTTISH SKIES
'Going away is coming home.' Ernesto Cardinal.
A great passion for travel and living in distant places informs my pictorial vision. Wherever I go I absorb sensation, the characteristics of the far away place. I collect pictorial notes, the aesthetic magnet is to look at deep, empty spaces of nature and contemplate their changes in time.
There is a compelling attraction in the phenomenology of the elements. It’s an inexhaustible dictionary of our condition.
The pairing of opposites, as in the substance of landscape matter with the ephemeral fleeting moment of continuous change, arrests my attention, makes me want to paint it as a means of both taking position and claiming possession, making it mine.
I absorb the light, and then mood, air and weather. There is a romantic dimension in that space extending beyond the visible, outside the edges of the painting and further than the horizon, intending to touch on the maybe, without being spelt out, and yet imagined.
Extensive experience of this elsewhere led me to acknowledge that the seeds for this language were sown during my childhood in the scottish landscape to which I return with this new series of paintings.
I would like these pictures to be about both the melancholy of place and the hope of a sense of endlessness.
Artist’s statement: 2009
LIGHT ON ANDALUCIA
My home is on the slope of a mountain seven
hundred metres above sea level. My
present inspiration is the mountains and beaches of southern Andalusia. These
paintings are about light and atmosphere, not the physical landscape, but how
the circumstances of the moment, light, weather and time of day affect my vision
of it.
When the clouds are below the horizon and a
small patch of sunlight breaks through a dark and moody sky to touch the
mountainside I am inspired; a fire burning in a valley of green, or the first
rays of sunlight on the windmills, a sea
glittering between a dark sky and a still unlit land.
I invite you to drift and meditate on this wild
and natural landscape, to escape from a crowded and highly stimulated world, to
capture a quiet feeling of space and wonderat nature's power, occasionally
punctuated by man's intervention.
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