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VICTORIA WEBB  
b. Washington, DC

I would love to hear from you. contact: vic@furiousdreams.com 

“One by one, million by million, in the prescience of dawn, every leaf in that part of the world was moved.” –James Agee

My work references landscape and how I perceive place. A secondary objective is to show that while superb areas of natural beauty still remain in most of the country, these are threatened by rapid development and encroachment.

I often begin with a loose sketch relative to the subject, usually begun outdoors. I then set about breaking that down into abstract planes, finding a tension between form and a focus on color, emotion and luminosity.  Like shamanistic practice, my paintings often represent animistic principles in terms of a collusion on canvas between nature and innermost emotions. The pieces will take on different perspectives and can radically change during the process of reworking and refining. My system originates from the inspiration of form and light on any given day, in space and a specific place, and then being surprised by transformation as the painting moves into its final stage. 

During my adult years, I’ve made homes in Canada (Nova Scotia, Toronto), Atlanta, San Francisco, the Midwest and now southeastern Pennsylvania. My most recent work concentrates on the region near my home in Pennsylvania and also includes paintings and sketches begun on vacations to rugged terrain like the mountains of British Columbia and Vancouver Island.

Living in Canada for four years in my early 20′s offered a wonderful, if practical, perspective on rural life, an untouched landscape and put me in touch with the Group of Seven and Emily Carr, early influences.

In the fall of 2007, I spent almost a month of intense independent study at an artist’s residency in Italy, painting the olive groves, rivers and fields, exploring ruins of semi-abandoned monasteries turned into private abodes. I found great inspiration there from the community’s obvious sense of place and respect for the artist’s hand. 

“Giving form to the unconscious does not involve unconscious action on the artist’s part… artistic activity, far from being haphazard… is governed by strict laws…” Reactions from the audience and viewer are often based, as Andre Malraux once said, on their own knowledge of the history of art. The framework of the painting holds the essence of light and color in a landscape and nature and makes that a meditation or metaphor of existential experience.

Press:

Philadelphia Inquirer 2007 
by Inquirer art critic Victoria Donohoe

Steve Dollar
NYC-based cultural critic

WEEKEND: VISUAL ARTS 2004
By JULIE YORK COPPENS
South Bend Tribune Staff Writer

Diem, BDA’s Journal Fall 1997
‘The Fine Line’, by Rebecca Barnes.

Art Papers, Jan/Feb 1989
‘Nepenthe’, review of Callanwolde show by Paul Evans

Art Papers, May/June 1987
‘State of the Art/Art of the State’, review of Nexus Biennale by Alan Sondheim

Art Papers, Nov/Dec 1986
‘Cutting Them off at the Pass/Experiments, Diversions and Lies’, review of
Mattress Factory Show.

I grew up in Princeton, NJ with cultural assets and opportunities that only recently I’ve come to appreciate. Art and music from early childhood through college – violin, piano, voice and harpsichord.

Throughout my adolescence I studied piano with a protégé of the great Nadia Boulanger, and until a hand injury at 19, I was intent on that and harpsichord studies. Years singing in the prestigious Princeton High School choir included difficult and beautiful pieces like Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms, Persichetti, Fauré’s Requiem Mass, Britten, Poulenc and many more that exposed us to contemporary secular choral music and gave some wild teenagers a deep appreciation of theory and structure.

My dad was a film editor and writer who grew up in Hollywood working with Sam Goldwyn in the 30′s, and was one of the film team who worked on the Nuremberg Trials, now in the Library of Congress. When I was a toddler, he spent a year in Myanmar’s capital (then Rangoon, Burma), teaching editing through a US gov’t program. My mother was a portrait/landscape painter who studied at the Art Students League in NY and continued painting right up until her death at almost 80. My siblings and I spent many hours during our childhood sitting for her portraits and studies. With an astute knowledge of art history and a voracious love of literature, she was a strong model for my life as an artist. 

I lived in Vermont, Toronto and Nova Scotia until the mid 70′s making an income from modeling and selling my hand watercolored prints door to door in Toronto, along with seasonal fruit picking, some badly given piano classes and hay farming. The genesis of a life long love of organic gardening, sustainability and socialism. Bought a log cabin with 40Acres on top of a mountain in western Maine. Moved to Atlanta a few years later, began painting from the figure and life, segueing into abstraction in the late 80′s.

I spent about 25 years working in broadcast television at production/design houses, networks and startups as first a designer and later, design director. That career paid nicely for my paint and canvas, along with comfortable shelter.  I’m now in mid-career change to the non-profit sector, where my skills and passion for the local food movement can work towards our struggle for sustainability.

Still hunting for that special land to protect.