“…painting is an affirmation of the existent, of the physical world into which mankind has been thrown.”
John Berger

“The blue and the yellow and the red all began to mix together. It was a terrible mess. But when the Wizard saw what was happening, he exclaimed, “That is the answer!” And he danced joyfully around the cellar.”
Arnold Lobel, The Great Blueness and other predicaments

“Landscapes are culture before they are nature; constructs of the imagination projected onto wood, water and rock.”
Simon Schama

Life is a slow transformation from the material to the ethereal. On this journey I believe we struggle to have understanding, wisdom and purpose.  Painting is an act of connection to, and a manifestation of this struggle.

I work on wood and on paper and I use a lot of mixed media in order to organize a kind of iconographic composition that serves to highlight an entropic event.  Ruins, recycled items, forgotten things and the decaying are all the beginning focus in my work.   I like to convey uncertainty, flux, restlessness and isolation; notions that I believe inhabit the natural world and our role we play in it. 

I use photography in my work to distil time.  I like to use the same photograph in different paintings; it addresses my need to overcome sentiment.  A photograph can be an unforgiving reminder of time, place and entropy.  I thrive on the clash between the cold documentation of a photograph and the emotive trajectory of painting.

I am a rural artist and spend much time in different odd, abandoned areas of the province (as well as trips to Newfoundland and Brooklyn) to photograph and research the residue left by industry and human impact.  My work up to now has attempted to tell the story of how buildings and things we make as humans, get left behind when the cycle of an economy is done.  The objects I focus on are abandoned; like headstones they mark a death, a resting place where once a community stirred.  In my paintings I reanimate them in order to evoke a sentient landscape. They are to me the residues of our need to mark ourselves onto the land. The ineffable area between the land, its indifference to us, and our need to see our image somewhere on its surface is where I want my work to exist. 

Through painting I have come to realize that creativity is a force that flows through the world, and those who harness it are people aware of their mortality.  Like ancient peoples that painted animals on the walls of caves to connect to their food and/or their deity, I too have a desire to connect to the world I have been thrown into.

Bio

Victoria Ward was born in Oshawa, Ontario, Canada in the mid-sixties.  She always wanted to be a painter because of her mother, who also painted and took her to art galleries at a young age.  After attending York University in Toronto, Ward spent the nineties working as a professional playwright and collaborating with the city’s most alternative artists: Theatre Gargantua, DNA Theatre, Autumn Leaf Performance, Kensington Carnival and Crow’s Theatre.  Ward still writes poetry and has a chapbook published, ‘notes from a log cabin’, Camenae Press 2003 and a new poetry book ‘shining or something electric’, Pointyhead Press.  She started painting full time in 1997 and has exhibited in Toronto, Barrie, Ottawa, Vancouver and Haliburton County where she now lives.

All art work and other media on this website should not to be reprinted or published in any form without the written consent of the artists. Hotspur Studio © 2000.