Name Victoria Crowe Role Artist | Books Victoria Crowe | |
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Victoria crowe on being a painter
Victoria Elizabeth Crowe OBE FRSE RSA (born 1945) is a Scottish artist known for her portrait and landscape paintings. She has works in several collections including the National Galleries of Scotland, the National Portrait Gallery, London, and the Royal Scottish Academy.
Contents
- Victoria crowe on being a painter
- Victoria Crowe Beyond Likeness
- Life
- Work
- Honours
- Exhibitions
- Collections
- References
Victoria Crowe | Beyond Likeness
Life
She was born in Kingston-on-Thames on 8 May 1945 and educated at Ursuline Convent Grammar School, London; Kingston College of Art; and the Royal College of Art, before moving to Scotland in 1968 to teach at Edinburgh College of Art. She and her husband Michael Walton settled at Kitleyknowe near Carlops in the Pentland Hills, Scotland.
Work
She began painting formal portraits in the early 1980s. She has produced many individual portraits, including RD Laing, Kathleen Raine, Tam Dalyell, and Peter Higgs.
Her work includes the series A Shepherd's Life, painted between 1970 and 1985 and first shown at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh in 2000, which portrays the life of Jenny Armstrong, an elderly shepherd from the Scottish Borders who was Crowe's neighbour at Kitleyknowe. One of the works in the series, Two Views, was converted into a tapestry by Dovecot Studios in Edinburgh, commissioned by Richard Scott, 10th Duke of Buccleuch.
She visited Italy in the early 1990s, which added the influence of Italian Renaissance art to her works, leading to a new phase of increased confidence and achievement. However, in 1994 her art was forced to respond to her son's diagnosis with cancer and then to his death in 1995, which resulted in a series of works expressing her grief, through repeated motifs such as the moon and flowers. Her works in the 21st century included wintry landscapes with skeletal hazel trees which Duncan Macmillan called "numinous pictures; they are spiritual landscapes".
Honours
Exhibitions
Collections
She has works in collections including: