2022 - Painting seems like a tic to me; it feels like a deep involuntary urge to react/interpret the world around me. I do it and it satisfies. I began painting in earnest when I moved to a rural area and found, over time, with all the nuances of spending every day in the woods, that wilderness is conceptual.  As someone who came from theatre and created dynamic stories, making paintings based on the landscape is a very natural, artistic evolution for me. The land lives in our imaginations and has as much to do with our inner lives as with the temporal world. 

I create markers on the land. My huts/shacks are just vestigial places where people have or may come to thrive.  They are “shaped architectural delineation of skin, absorbent and refined toward a cosmology of indwelling” (Marilynn Cherry 2021). Through layers of paint, they become a metamorphic skin signaling these ideas: home, cottage, shelter, camp, headstone, and crypt.  For me the people that inhabit these paintings are myself and viewers who stand before them.  Complete the story I say through paint.

I have now for over thirty years been on an aesthetic quest.  One can only realize such a thing when they get close to sixty years of age.  All my work from the very beginning has conveyed ideas of place; who are we in our place, what is our place when we are here, how does place transform over time and how does that transformation impact us?  Place lives in our hearts and minds.  There is a term that scientists engaged in exploring other planets use, ‘terrestrial analogue’; physical locations on Earth that resemble aspects of other worlds.  We use landscapes similarly, as markers/stand ins for our desires – we want the money and excitement of an urban location or the quiet solace of a rural one.  Each place is pulled together by us as manifestations of how we want to live. 

Painting the landscape no longer feels like a genre move or having anything to do with a career (what is that anyway?). It feels now like a push toward eternity, a remapping of my own being and a readying for the rest of the path I am on.  The work has always been a ‘palimpsest’.  The world is incorporeal in sedimentary ways as well as with rock.  I am part of many layers of art, and I set my work into my present layer.

Bio

Victoria Ward was born in Oshawa, Ontario, Canada. A painter primarily, Ward still writes and contributes to catalogues, cultural journals and digital sites across Canada. She lives near Algonquin Park in a log cabin with her partner Gary Blundell. 

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