I asked Virginia to tell us about the body of work she is showing here at Partners Gallery in October.
“These paintings were made over the last two years in a temporary workspace. I lost my beloved studio of nine years when the landlord sold the building. Almost everything had to be dismantled and placed in storage.”
So what did you do? Where did you go?
“There was a room on our property I could squeeze into while a new studio was being planned. The space, charming as it was, proved too cramped and dark, inappropriate for a studio. Still, I was grateful I had a place to work."
"Then last winter, as construction began, this scary ladder was the only access I had to the studio. It was especially thrilling when I had to climb down in the rainy winter dark and navigate over the chunks of concrete and rebar to reach the muddy ground.”
So this series of paintings was made in that difficult space.
"In the spirit of the considerable darkness and the depressing feelings that workspace aroused in me, I began making what I have named the Midnight Paintings. These were a transition from the bright noon paintings of recent years to something opposite."
"In my work over many decades time has sometimes been a subject. For the last fifteen years it has become, most specifically and overtly, a focus. ‘Midnight’ may be a metaphor for the night sky, the cosmos, terror and despair, and death and mortality."
“Painting is a medium I feel in my body as well as comprehend in my mind. All of my paintings are existential. Some in this exhibition are in service to a kind of stasis or primordial beauty, and others depict the structure of a life and its passage through time. Both Voyage to Arcadia and Tenzing, for example, have on the left side of the canvas a geometry of one’s early life. Then to the right is the boundless spatial field in which one is alive and glimpses of the divine and of beauty are possible as one meanders and descends or ascends through this gift of life."