About Victoria Orr Ewing

Victoria Orr Ewing (b.1962) is a Scottish contemporary landscape painter. She is  best known for her large scale paintings of uncultivated wilderness where weather and nature dominate. Her work appears in private and corporate collections throughout the world.

From her early beginnings growing up on a farm on the Mull of Galloway, landscape has always been a source of inspiration. The coast and moors of this beautiful and dramatic peninsular have helped to give her work a sense of space and drama.

Having graduated The City and Guilds of London Art School in 1986, a passion for travel and living in distant places informed her pictorial vision. In 2001 she bought a piece of land on the slopes of a mountain overlooking the rugged landscape of Southern Spain with views down the valley to the Mediterranean and over to Morocco.

Living in front of one of the most dramatic views in Europe Victoria became interested in the landscape and the phenomena of the elements acting upon it. The experience living and painting in Spain led her to acknowledge that the seeds for this language were sown during her childhood in the Scottish landscape.

In 2016 Victoria moved back to UK and now lives in rural Gloucestershire. She continues to be inspired by landscape in its most pristine and primeval form. She has made several expeditions to The West Coast of Scotland and the Hebridean Islands. We see in her work Moorland and Machair Grasses of hues of green with copper and gold highlighted by a shard of sunlight breaking through the clouds. Unlikely turquoise sea intensified by dark brooding skies. The presence of a  solitary house, an isolated road or seemingly futile fence evokes feelings of vulnerability in the face of Nature’s vastness.

To create a body of work she absorbs herself in the landscape. Driving, walking, stopping and observing. The light, and then mood, air and weather. Watching the landscape appear and disappear in the mist and rain where horizons are hazy. Wet Sunlight soft or fleeting. Sensing the mythical spirit of the landscape where everything is in a process of being and becoming. The immediate experience quickly sketched in front of the subject and later from the memory of the day. Larger paintings are made in the studio, using these sketches and the imagination, memory and feeling of the place.

These paintings invite you to loose yourself in this wild and natural landscape. They feel so far removed from urban life and reflect on the importance of retaining these wild, uncultivated places. To escape a crowded and highly stimulated world, to capture a quiet feeling of space and wonder at nature's power. 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.

Now living in South West England, Victoria’s direction of travel is towards more abstracted and imagined landscapes.  Becoming Less about an actual place. Drawn to the wilds of Dartmoor but, also the flat agricultural land closer to home, weather and atmosphere still playing the major role in her work.

“My art is my way of responding to the spirit that rolls through all things, and answer to my passion for wild, unspoiled places. I am fascinated by the mysterious way paint expresses the inexplicable. Atmosphere and light are crucial to the impact of my paintings. Although inspired by a geographical place, I want to express the universal essence of landscape with just enough to let the beholder form their interpretation, referencing a sense of our ephemerality in the face of nature's enduring vastness”.