We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Victoria Arthur. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Victoria below.
Alright, Victoria thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Do you wish you had waited to pursue your creative career or do you wish you had started sooner?
I’ve always been an artist. But as I started out in my life, the artist had to wait its turn. I chose the life of a wildlife biologist, mother, and wife. After graduating from high school, I just didn’t have the confidence I would need to make art my career. A life in nature and working toward its protection fulfilled another side of myself. Yet, when I retired in 2016, I knew instinctively that art was the undone thing in my life. I knew I wanted to return to art, but I had no idea how immersed I would find myself . I now split my time between Volcano, Hawaii and Brooklyn, NY. My work is inspired by a long history of immersion in the natural world. My 34-year career was as a field wildlife biologist and as a conservation education specialist for federal agencies. I was educated in biological science and conservation education before art school. A large part of my work as a field biologist consisted of hiking around forests and lakes, wetlands, and meadows. I surveyed wildlife species on public lands that warranted protections from resource extraction projects like timber sales or mining. My work as a biologist provided me with an excellent adventure that fed my spirit. Throughout the years, I took some short-term art classes and workshops, but I never felt like I had the time that was needed to develop as an artist.
Now that I’ve graduated from Pratt Institute with an MFA in Painting, I’m finding my adventure as an artist a wonderful, new life chapter. I wouldn’t change a thing about my life’s journey. The artist within me waited for this chapter in my life.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
I started painting in Hawaii, working en plein air, painting outdoors in front of the subject. The idea is to capture the light and the scene in one session. My paintings were of dynamic ocean scenes, with clouds, storms, wind and light on the water. Another subject I often painted was the Hawaiian rainforest. Plein Air painting connected making art with my experience of working outdoors in all kinds of conditions. It was pure joy.
When I started painting in my New York studio at Pratt Institute, I learned to access my landscapes through memory and imagination. I spent my first semester painting oceanscapes from my memories of afternoons of painting the Hawaii coastline. During my second year, I began to paint forest landscapes.
I was beginning to get a feel for the New York art world and how nature was being interpreted by different contemporary artists. My practice included a weekly Saturday routine of touring galleries, museums, and art-related forays in and around New York City. As I developed a greater understanding of contemporary art, I began to enter a more fantastical conversation in the creative interpretation of the forest.
In my more expressive paintings, my approach is varying the amount and location of clues to the literal forest that I paint.
My work evokes movement, flow, light, wind, and energy. The paintings can be described as having energetic and performative bold strokes, often expressed in impasto. Wind and flow are often expressed through continuous, flowing brushstrokes and indications of light through color. The paintings are meant to connect with the viewer’s emotions.
As well as aspiring to create paintings that viewers will appreciate, it’s my intention to inspire the viewer toward connection and concern for our natural world. I want to evoke the feelings of being in a beautiful forest or other natural setting, as well as imparting a concern for the environmental issues of our times. Clues of environmental distress often emerge from my paintings. I’m portraying a beautiful but stressed natural world and hoping this will inspire viewers toward caring about the natural world we depend on.
What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?
My intention in immersing myself in art comes from knowing that I have something to add to the visual conversation that we call art. I’m striving to have my artwork connect with people on an emotional level and to move them to care about our natural world and its stewardship. I know some people have expressed that my paintings had this effect on them. I’m a bit greedy to reach many more people this way!
For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?
The pent up artist within me is busting out with creativity and the joy of living the undone dream! At the same time, being an artist is really hard, and often a really challenging occupation. This is keeping me on my toes!
It’s wonderful to get to live immersed in everyone’s creativity, whether in a museum or fellow artists at a studio. I love this!
My fortune cookie tells me that I am happiest when I am working toward a goal. I think this explains why I would take the life of an artist on in this chapter of my life. There is no age-limit on being an artist, so I’ve picked a good goal!
Contact Info:
- Website: www.vickiarthurart.com
- Instagram: @vickiarthurart
Image Credits
Two of the photos are credited to Federico Savini @1888fsavini