framed dimensions: 64 x 79 cm
signed lower left, titled verso
EXHIBITED:
Victoria Crowe – New Work, Edinburgh Festival Exhibition, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 2001, cat. 36; Victoria Crowe: Beyond Likeness, Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh, 2018
The practice of an artist using his or her own family as models is commonplace and often a mere expedient. For Victoria Crowe, however, the painting of her daughter Gemma made in 2000 is a significant painting for the artist and her family. It was not long after the tragic death of Gemma’s big brother Ben and the sitter has a cool defiance that looks forward as well as back. The setting of Italy is also significant being the place where Crowe found the milieu to reengage with new material in the psychological locus of her genesis as a painter. The carmine palette and quattrocento sensibility are both new and familiar, her painting a palimpsest: accreted layers of time and emotion. Gemma seems to stand ina chamber, veiled on her right while behind, a figure of the Virgin Mary holds a rose without thorn – a symbol of purity. On her left a strong shaft of yellow light lends a glow to her skin, while a renaissance beauty in profile stares in with indifference.
About Victoria Crowe
Victoria Crowe studied at Kingston School of Art from 1961-65 and at the Royal College of Art, London, from 1965-68. At her postgraduate show, she was invited by Sir Robin Philipson to teach at Edinburgh College of Art. For thirty years she worked as a part-time lecturer in the School of Drawing and Painting while developing her own artistic practice. She lives and works in West Linton and Edinburgh. Her first one-person exhibition, after leaving the Royal College of Art, was in London and has subsequently held over fifty, one person shows.
