06 Sep Artist Spotlights: Victoria Veedell

Victoria Veedell paints the world around her to capture its enduring emotional impact. Rather than faithful physical representations, she says, “I create atmospheric landscapes that are memories of places or the emotions I was feeling when I was there.”

Consider, for example, Nightfall San Francisco. The dreamlike composition began with a visit at dusk to Crissy Field, a part of Golden Gate National Park reclaimed from an old airfield and marshlands less than a mile east of the Golden Gate Bridge. With her smartphone, she snapped ample photos, “studying how the light and colors were changing.” Back at her water-view studio on the second floor of a wooden building at Hunters Point, a decommissioned World War II U.S. Navy shipyard on the bay, she sorted through those images, selecting several that captured the sense of place. “Then I cropped and changed them in Photoshop and printed them out in black and white.”

On the Coast | Oil on Canvas | 24 x 24 inches | 2023

Those became the launchpad for distilling her memories and emotions onto a primed 3-by-3-foot canvas. Using a selection from among her estimated 100 hardware-store brushes in sizes ranging from 3 to .5 inches across, all so well-worn that they endow the canvas with rich, dreamlike texture, she then loosely blocked in a composition in hot pink paint that shows through here and there in the finished work; then, she gradually built up the more detailed depths in purples, blues, and dark greens, along with flashes of yellow and more pink. The result feels entirely true to the setting — yet a world apart.

Veedell has long viewed her surroundings with eyes toward the wondrous. Growing up in suburban Houston, Texas, she frequently attended art classes and summer art camps, and loved taking her mom’s old blue wooden oils box out to the garage to paint “fantasy mountains and hills,” among other subjects. Her interests briefly took a turn when she entered Texas A&M–Corpus Christi to study dentistry. But that didn’t last long. Soon, she was taking a full studio art curriculum, including life-changing classes with a professor who had studied under the famed abstract painter and color theorist Josef Albers. “That was so expansive, making me feel I was on the right path.”

Nightfall San Francisco | Oil on Canvas | 36 x 36 inches | 2024

After graduation, her journey continued through a summer studying in France’s Loire Valley, where her passion for landscapes soared; graduate work at New York University, followed by seven years of painting in New York; two more years in Japan, with frequent journeys around Asia; and, finally, in 2003, settling happily in the Bay Area, from which she has traveled to painting residencies in locations as far afield as Vermont, Finland, Iceland, India, Newfoundland, and, this fall, Virginia. Veedell is inspired by “the changes in light and atmosphere” while happily returning to her home base. “I can get out and explore here from morning to night and study how the light and the colors change,” all key elements of the enchanted scenes she brings to life.

Veedell’s work is represented by Aerena Galleries in St. Helena, Healdsburg, Napa, and Mill Valley, California; and at Avenue 12 Gallery in San Francisco. She will also participate in Hunters Point Shipyard Open Studios in San Francisco on October 19 and 20.

Based in San Rafael, California, Norman Kolpas is the author of more than 40 books and hundreds of articles. He also teaches nonfiction writing in The Writers’ Program at UCLA Extension.