Victoria Orr Ewing, 'Still Waters'

Victoria Orr Ewing makes paintings that evoke landscape, sometimes adhering to reality, other times reducing forms into abstracted colour fields. Her source material ranges from wild, empty places, stark and haunting, carrying a hint of ominous beauty, to more personal scenes such as her garden or the fields beyond. She is particularly drawn to liminal spaces - places between places where edges blur and boundaries shift. The marshlands of North Norfolk embody this duality, acting as a protective threshold between sea and land, constantly reshaped by the tides. These landscapes carry a deep sense of mystery and history, not only defending against flood but offering richness and sustenance. They are spaces of quiet tension, at once vulnerable and vital.

Her paintings are often pared back, devoid of detail. Whether reflecting the vastness of wild moorland and marshes or the intimate quiet of domestic terrain, her work explores how we interact with landscape on both grand and personal scales. A specific kind of light, a soft radiance between darker forms, acts as a unifying presence throughout her work. She seeks to capture the meditative stillness of watching land appear and disappear with shifting light and weather. Her aim is not only to depict the landscape but to render the air around it. In mist and rain, the atmosphere becomes visible.

Raised on a farm in a remote part of southwest Scotland, Victoria developed an early and enduring reverence for the natural world. Her work explores this bond, offering the viewer a world of numinous mystery, whether in the wilderness, a garden, or an open field. It is a gloaming world where vividly real places affect us as much through absence as through presence. Her process begins on location with swift sketches in watercolour or oil, capturing the immediate essence of place. These are developed into small studio studies, shaped by both memory and continued observation. Some evolve into larger oil paintings. Alongside direct observation, she also draws from blurred photographs, film stills, and digital imagery, balancing immediacy with distance to create works that feel both familiar and elusive.

Victoria Orr Ewing (b. 1962) studied at City & Guilds Art School. She has had solo exhibitions with The Fine Art Society, Panter & Hall, and she organised an independent solo exhibitions at 11 Avenue Studios. Sydney Mews, London. She has shown regularly in mixed exhibitions with Kevis House Gallery, Petworth. Recently short listed for the Irving Gallery Open and Gallery At Home Summer Open. The Beep Biannual, Wells Contemporary, ING Discerning Eye and RI painters in watercolour. Between 2000 and 2016 she lived and worked in Andalusia showing regularly in Southern Spain. During this time she won the Gibraltar International Art Competition. She now lives and works in South West England.