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Victoria has always enjoyed art and design, whether it is looking at the work of others or creating work of her own. As a young child she was always drawing, painting or colouring in, and she won several local competitions including painting and photography. She was very much influenced by her grandmother who is well known locally as a professional artist and teacher of art, and with whom she would spend hours just playing around with paint and a huge range of materials. She believes this to be the reason for having become very experimental with materials in her work. She uses household materials to create her art whether it is food colouring, tomato ketchup, nail varnish or toothpaste. She claims to be a contemporary artist, but that's not to say that she doesn't enjoy using oil paints on canvas or drawing realistic portraits, because that is where her talents really lie and where they are more clearly visible. She also enjoys photography, both digital and traditional, although she will only use digital photographs as a starting point for a painting as she doesn't believe they are valuable enough to use as photographs in their own right. Victoria does enjoy manipulating the images and distorting them on the computer to create interesting compositions for paintings. This is where her interest in graphic design began. A quote from the artist, "The beauty of traditional photography is that you have to get it right first time because you cannot delete it and take it again. The film negative cannot be wiped and then reused, so the photographs can be unique. This means that you take more time in setting up your composition so that it is absolutely perfect."
As young artist in Reading there has never really been a lot to inspire her, but she is well travelled having visited places such as Madrid, Goa, Canada and New York over the years. Victoria uses these experiences to inspire her work along with current affairs or anything else that happens to affect her life. Of course she has never been far away from London and its beautiful arts and culture and she regularly takes trips to galleries and exhibitions as well as theatre productions, which she loves.
Victoria has studied a Vocational A-Level in art and design and in September of this year she will be starting a degree course in Graphic Design and Visual Communication at Surrey Institute of Art and Design in Farnham. This will allow her to study art and design of the digital age, because she believes that is where we are heading, if we are not there already, but her passion is definitely still with painting and drawing.
Up until now she has only been undertaking commissions but soon will be reverting back to what she enjoys the most and offer her artwork to everyone.
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