Collection: Artist: Victoria Pinney

At six years old I took my first airplane ride. What I saw from the window was a revelation: the earth’s topography transformed into a patchwork of textures, colors and shapes. Later, I understood this way of seeing to be abstraction and it continues to be the foundation of my art.

Like that early vision from the air, I find that things like rusted rail cars, crumbling stone walls, the mottled bark of a sycamore tree - even peeling paint - become microcosms of beauty that inspire my paintings. The textured surface is as essential to the painting as color or shape.

I work intuitively with oil paint and elemental substances such as wax and sand, building up, and then scratching through, layers and layers of “history” until the image reveals itself. To me, these paintings feel ancient, as though they contain all of history, allowing us to peek at the the past through erosion of the present - each layer partially visible through the next.

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Victoria Pinney, largely a self-taught artist, works in her open studio in Asheville, North Carolina's vibrant River Arts District. Her brightly colored abstractions have been shown in galleries from Delaware to Oregon and are in private collections across the country. Art Galleries and Artists of the South recently identified Victoria as an "emerging artist".