Please join us from 5-7pm for Mill Valley’s First Tuesday Artwalk and an Artist Reception featuring the works of Victoria Veedell and Carol Duchamp.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Victoria Veedell Artist Statement
My paintings are like memories, suggesting landscapes not necessarily seen but felt. They are an emotional response to the environment. I want to share the way I see and feel when I’m out in nature. My fascination with the way light affects color and atmosphere keeps me excited to continue to explore and paint new landscapes. I feel like the possibilities are endless. Within each painting I hope to create a sense of stillness and serenity.
My inspiration comes from my travels both near and far. Travel has become an important component in my work as it allows me to observe and compare gradients of color, light and atmosphere in different geographic locations. My travels have taken me to many places such as Iceland, Shanghai, Kerela (India) and Japan. Whether it’s overseas or around my home in the Bay Area of California, I gather ideas by taking walks and recording my observations with photography and watercolor studies. These become the memory of place and source of inspiration. I make all of my oil paintings in the studio on canvas, paper or wood panel.
I begin a series of paintings by sorting through the photos and small studies. Once I have a selection I want to work with, I manipulate the photos in Photoshop by cropping or blurring to the desired effect. I like to begin a painting with a loose under-painting of either bright pink or yellow this allows for a bit of that color to peek through the layers adding excitement to the final painting. I continue to build up the surface through successive layering of colors moving from darks to lights and back again. The paintings are made up of countless layers of paint and glazing of colors. As I paint, I react to subsequent layers until and an inner glow appears and the image emerges.
*Featured photo (right): “Saturday Morning Presidio” oil on canvas, 48″x48″
“Meanderings” by Carol Duchamp
Artist Statement
I am a spontaneous painter working wet-on-wet in the mediums of watercolor and fluid acrylic paint. The expressive quality of my work invites the viewer on a pilgrimage into the unknown. My process highlights the freedom of the unforeseen; the magic of beautiful passages that ‘paint themselves’, and the resonance of wordless experience.
Each painting is its own song, leitmotif, jazz improvisation. Usually it is when a painting is complete that I can begin to decipher the nature of its source and meaning. I honor the mystery of being that is at the heart of art making. Though indeterminacy and chance play a major role; craft, intuition and faith in the co-arising outcome are intricate to my process.
My work is grounded in the feeling tone of experience and the intrinsic nature of the materials I use. Each painting has an inner rhythm, a melody line, and gestural sweeps of color. Sense memories of my travels, nature, the personal and transpersonal inner landscapes of the human condition, films, emotional states, and my life as a woman are among the sources of inspiration that arise spontaneously.
I sometimes gaze with wonder at the visual result, comprehending the state of being that embedded itself in the work. I can see that a trail walk on Mt. Tamalpais or a sense memory of drift snorkeling in Polynesia or a feeling of sadness, loss, maybe anger has made its way into the painting, and graced it with meaning and the promise of intimacy with what is.
When I was a young girl growing up in southern Ohio, I spotted an iridescent blue racer snake slithering through the green grass at summer camp. In this moment of childlike wonder, fascination, and enhanced perception, I fell in love with color.
I do not plan my paintings nor do I know what movement, instinct, gesture or choice of color will arise. Nothing is pre-determined and the white pre-soaked paper placed on my painting table represents the joy of freedom to create, to give birth to the new, to journey into the unknown. The possibility of magic and mystery hold sway. The dance between my state of heart/mind as the artist, the pigment, and the water itself begins. The shapes and meanings arrive in search of me, painting themselves in vibrant color.
*Featured photo (left):
