About
I’ve always loved to draw: from art school days, drawing became a conversation with myself which has stayed with me as an important reflection on life as I get older. Being at art school in the 60s brought with it the realisation that I had found the right place to grow and develop.
During those formative years, I came into contact with so much new thinking, and the three-year post-graduate at RCA was a gift in which to widen, consolidate and assimilate the experience. I was hugely lucky to have met my life partner, Michael Walton, a painting student at the same time, and to share our subsequent journey. Immediately after my degree show, we moved to Scotland where I began teaching at Edinburgh College of Art and developing my own practice as a painter. I began responding to the landscape around a new home in the Pentland Hills south of Edinburgh.
“Victoria Crowe had found a landscape that suited her. It was dramatic certainly. It was spare and austere, too, as her painting had already often been, but the special quality that perhaps drew such a response from her was the way that it defied all the popular tropes of representational landscape painting. She herself said of these pictures, ‘I liked the transforming nature of the snow – the commonplace becomes strangely different, the familiar contours of the field and hill become softened and unsure’.”
So began a lifetime’s involvement with painting. The work has responded to creative ideas and enquiry that events and people have brought into my life. It has reflected on a growing interest in psychology, symbolism, poetry and music as well as on personal research, family trauma, travel and the wonderful opportunity to have a studio in Venice.
“The new work seems a faultless progression reflecting the different loci of her creative output: West Linton, Edinburgh and Venice. The distinctive tonality of her work evokes a musical analogy; like the dodecaphony of late Stravinsky a profound mood is set while her rich and varied palette and iconography takes us to different emotional places. In Venice a mood is evoked just beyond comprehension; textures are complex; the city is as much about loss and decay as about beauty and the artist’s observations are a journey into her own past as well as the city’s: partially revealed, enigmatic insights, emotional rubbings taken from the city’s walls, antiquities and vistas. In Scotland it is predominantly a wintry vision, a cool counterpoint to an Italianate Landscape, in which a garden or landscape is laid bare and beautiful but with all the cruel potential of a Schubert Lieder.”
In 2019 the City Art Centre in Edinburgh exhibited 50 Years of Painting, a lifetime retrospective of my work. One of the most important aspects of this show for me was a confirmation that my art had been central to my evolving understanding of my life experiences: all the new thoughts, the family events, concerns about the natural world and the mystery of existence were all there. The inner conversation is still continuing!
Victoria Crowe, April 2021
Film made to accompany the major retrospective at the City Art Centre, Edinburgh © City Art Centre and the Edinburgh Film Company
Victoria Crowe, Giudecca, Venice. Photograph © Kenneth Gray