Welcome to Virginia Creighton
Statement
I use an expressive landscape to create a metaphor for a human event. I break up a flat spatial composition by means of idiosyncratic markings and painterly clusters of intense color arranged episodically across the picture plane. Each unit has a life of its own but also shadows the next in an atypical hue.
Man-made objects may be integrated within the composition. Buildings are restructured versions of the cave or forest opening where once we slept. These items converse with nature. I try to endow nature with qualities that do not “belong” to it. I see nature as the final power in our human history.
On first impression, forms may look indecipherable or unfamiliar in the context of the painting. However, on reflection, they may be recognized as symbols conveying personal meaning.
For example, “Ahab’s Wedding Cake–Widows Walk House, New Bedford” is painted from the point of view of the young wife and child whom Captain Ahab left behind. Their house appears as a freshly made cake waiting to be eaten upon his return, an event fated not to occur.
Ahab’s Wedding Cake–Widows Walk House, New Bedford
2010
Oil on canvas
36” x 60”
Testimonials
…this tree, living in the wild but somehow domesticated, becomes an accomplice in the lives of humans, and in so doing itself becomes an animate character.
… the paintings function poetically, for they cannot be read as illustrations. They are renderings - visually conceived - of the artist’s sensibility, elaborated by a pictorial language that is neither pure landscape nor pure abstraction, but a painterly mélange, held together by intuition.
My Work
Select a body of work to see more.