Scottish Skies
Panter & Hall, Bury Street, London
Landscape Paintings of The West Coast of Scotland
Raised in Galloway, Victoria lived and painted in Andalucia for sixteen years, drawn to its wild landscapes and changing light. In 2012 she returned to Scotland to create ¨Scottish Skies.¨ The emphasis on the sky remaining in her art, emboldened by the dark, complex hues of Scotland’s weather
Forward by Michael Heindorff.
"Going away is coming home". Ernesto Cardinal
A great passion for travel and living in distant places informs Victoria’s pictorial vision. Wherever she go she absorbs sensation, the characteristics of the faraway place. Victoria collects 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 her attention, makes her want to paint it as a means of both taking position and claiming possession, making it hers.
She 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 her to acknowledge that the seeds for this language were sown during her childhood in the Scottish landscape to which she returns 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.”
