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.
 
As with that early vision from the air, I find microcosms of beauty that inspire my paintings.  Rusted rail cars, crumbling stone walls, the mottled bark of a sycamore tree, even peeling paint are all textured surfaces that are essential to my paintings in color and shape.
 
I work intuitively with oil paint and elemental substances such as wax and sand.  By building up and then scratching through layers of ‘history’ until the underlying image reveals itself, each layer becomes partially visible through the next.  To me, these paintings feel ancient, as though they contain all of history, allowing us to peek into the past through the erosion of the present.
 
Victoria Pinney is largely a self-taught artist.  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.”