Life With Victoria Crowe: ‘I’ve drawn ever since I was a small child and even then it was a kind of conversation with myself’

One of Scotland’s leading painters and most recognised artists, Victoria Crowe, on her childhood, art being her first love, and her time in Venice. 

I’ve lived in the Borders ever since we moved up to Scotland in 1968. I have a studio there and also one in Edinburgh. I grew up in Kingston which is now part of Greater London, but when I lived there, it was fairly rural and very near to Ham common and the glorious Richmond Park, which I used to spend a lot of time in. 

I went to school in Wimbledon. One of the great benefits of that (apart from the education) was that we would visit the All England Tennis courts after school. We would ask visitors for their tickets as they were leaving for the day, and get great seats in Centre Court and court number one for the evening matches .

I think one of my favourite places in Scotland is still Kittleyknowe, near Carlops where we lived for 20 years . It was situated on the moorland plain at the foot of the Pentlands with Edinburgh to the north. It was an isolated hamlet 1,000 feet up and visually beautiful winters a great place to bring up children and a lovely sense of community . 

As an artist I found the landscape dramatic and inspiring – our neighbour the Shepherd Jenny Armstrong became an important feature of my work in those days and I learnt much about rural living. 

Thaw, Traces, Distance

I’ve drawn ever since I was a small child and even then it was a kind of conversation with myself – just another way of thinking and communicating. My very earliest memories of painting were of yellow and pink watercolour paint sitting at the table with my mother. Later, the tiny pots of runny oil paint in Painting by Numbers sets, where you only really saw what you had painted by standing a long way away from the ‘canvas’. 

I started art school when I was 16 and learnt everything about tone and colour, observation, how to draw and think visually. As an art student I felt that I had suddenly landed with a group of like-minded people – it was an exciting time. 

It was great to see my retrospective exhibition held at Edinburgh’s City Art Centre in 2019. The show was called Fifty Years of Drawing and Painting. It was an opportunity for me to be able to trace ideas within the work over such a long period of time and to get some perspective on what I’d done. There is so much art that resonates deeply with me but on a personal level it’s always the next painting I’m going to do that’s the most important.

Credit: Kenneth Gray

For about 12 years, we had a studio in Venice on the Guidecca, which is a large, long island one vaporetto stop away from the Zattere. We were so near to the centre of Venice and yet we were apart from it, living where there were real families and real shops and at the time we were there, not quite so many tourists. I loved everything about the city. Venice is  fragile, enduring and very beautiful. There’s always the changing light, the moving water  of the canal and lagoon, the great art treasures, a medieval wall in sunlight, the Venetians who became our friends. And the food is pretty good too.

I don’t believe in ghosts, but I do recognise a spirit of place, that quality of being somewhere out of time, in touch with something meaningful and eternal. As a child, I loved the Neolithic sites and votive trees around Saint Just in Cornwall where my mother‘s family came from. When recently working in Orkney there was such a powerful feeling of that ancient land, the complete relevance of the locations of worship, burial, and settlement sites within the elements of land and water, sun and moon.

The Silence of Winter

As she approaches her 80th birthday, artist Victoria Crowe has created a new body of work which ‘looks back to move forward’. The Scottish Gallery, where Victoria had her first solo show in 1970, has put together a retrospective that showcases the collection of new works, which reflect more than six decades of her art.

Decades runs at The Scottish Gallery (main exhibition) and Dovecot Studios, Edinburgh, from 31 July –30 August.

Read more from the Life With series here.

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