Victoria Orr Ewing in her studio
I make paintings that evoke landscape, at times with an adherence to reality, at other times favouring reduction into abstracted colour fields. They consider how we experience landscape, from the vastness of cosmic space to intimate moments of particular light within our personal environments, and at times draw on imagined or remembered places.
I am especially drawn to wild, sparsely inhabited landscapes that fill one with awe and a profound sense of being small within the vastness of our planet. Empty moors, marshes, coastlines and remote places, often stark and sublime, carrying a hint of ominous beauty. More recently, a trip to Morocco and the Sahara Desert has informed my painting practice, captivated by its immense scale, silence and shifting light. These landscapes evoke both wonder and vulnerability, reminding us of nature’s scale and enduring power.
The common thread throughout my work is a specific kind of light, a radiance emerging between darker forms. I select times of day and weather conditions that evoke an atmosphere of melancholic grace. I give equal weight to every element in the painting, avoiding any hierarchy of meaning.
My paintings are often pared back, creating a visual threshold beyond which the viewer encounters an expansive sense of space. I work from sketches made from life, sometimes memory, and occasionally photographs, but I am primarily concerned with achieving an emotional response to being in a particular landscape rather than a literal description. Alongside this, I am equally inspired by intimate domestic spaces such as my garden and the immediate surroundings of home, holding in tension the vulnerability of vast landscapes with the protection of familiar, enclosed places.
I am interested in places between places, edges and borders. I perceive borders not simply as physical demarcations on a map, but as complex symbols that define, divide and connect us, representing safety and exclusion, identity and division, freedom and restriction.
My work reflects the contradictory nature of the spaces we inhabit.
Victoria’s website can be viewed here