§ VICTORIA CROWE O.B.E., F.R.S.E., R.S.A. (BRITISH 1945-)

VICTORIA CROWE O.B.E., F.R.S.E., R.S.A. (BRITISH 1945-)
TIMES OF TWILIGHT AND RICHES
Signed lower right edge, signed and inscribed with title verso, oil on board
50cm x 120cm (19.75in x 47.25in)
Victoria Crowe’s paintings resist easy categorisation. Folding in still life, landscape and portraiture components, she weaves a rich tapestry of motifs arranged across the composition as if in dialogue: sprigs of jasmine perfuming a twilit night glimpsed, in reflection, beyond a distant copse; a classical icon echoing a portrait of the artist’s own likeness; a dusty mantelpiece layered with photographs and bibelots, alive with memory. Each motif represents a biographical thread in the artist’s life, the products of a lifetime’s accrual of imagery and meaning. In this sense, Crowe’s paintings can be read as composite self-portraits - yet the permeating theme of transience and transcendence invests her intensely personal and intimate imagery with existential significance, and herein lies the power of her iconographical lexicon.Victoria Crowe studied at Kingston School of Art and the Royal College of Art in London. Owing to the strength of her 1968 postgraduate exhibition, she was invited to teach at Edinburgh College of Art by Sir Robin Philipson, the school’s head of painting and drawing. Crowe and her husband made the drastic decision to exchange swinging sixties London for the remote hamlet of Kitleyknowe in the Scottish Borders. For the next thirty years Crowe taught part-time at ECA, all the while cultivating her painting and drawing practice in her own time. She also worked frequently in Venice, and by 2003 had taken a studio on the Giudecca.In 2000 the National Galleries of Scotland held the exhibition A Shepherd’s Life, which collected Crowe’s paintings from the 1970s and ‘80s depicting the life of the aging shepherdess Jenny Armstrong, also a resident of Kitleyknowe. The exhibition was met with great critical acclaim. A subsequent major exhibition at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in 2018, and a retrospective at the Edinburgh City Art Centre in 2019, have affirmed Victoria Crowe’s status as one of the country’s most distinguished artists working today. Crowe was awarded an O.B.E. for Services to Art in 2004.