NONFICTION   -
           WITH  A THEME OF WORK        

Art Work by the Author                                    

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Work
by  Louise Victor

​I am Louise Victor.
 
A painter, draughtsman, and educator as well as a retired airline captain. I was the second woman in the world to qualify as a Captain on the Boeing 767.
 
In these confusing, chaotic, troubling times, the need to find unity and meaning is a search for wisdom and enlightenment. I believe that art is an expression of this search.
 
I came to art early in life. When I was in first grade, I was fortunate one day to be able to miss recess. During this time, my teacher, Sister Charlotte, made a drawing of me. A simple drawing with charcoal. I sat patiently and when she finished, she showed it to me. Now I don’t remember most of my childhood, but I do remember the drawing and my reaction.
 
There on the paper was me. I was startled to see my pigtails and freckles, but what really struck me was the fact that there was something more in this drawing than what I saw in the mirror. She had captured something about me that was beyond my capability to put into words.
 
This was art. It became sacred and important and special to me.
 
As a teenager, I made renderings for an architect and I fell in love with drawing and particularly lines. I grew to believe that drawing was at the basis of all visual art and that anyone can be taught how to draw. Drawing is more than a tool for capturing likenesses. It is a language. Learning to draw is about learning to see. Whatever its form, drawing transforms perception and thought into image and teaches us how to think with our eyes. It is learning by hand. It is muscle memory, something that proved to be true in more than art, when I started flying. 

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​The concepts were similar—you take something apart. You look at each piece separately, understand it and then combine it with the other pieces that you have studied as well. They fit back together like a jigsaw puzzle. Everything is about its relationship to everything else.
 
And lines help with this. Line is the ‘language’ that we use to translate our three-dimensional world onto a two-dimensional surface. It has brought me to the further exploration of how we define space in a painting or drawing. Lines guide you around the edges of things and tie them together one to another.
 
I think of life as an entanglement of lines, relationships that build a society. And these play a prominent part in my work.
 
Paul Klee famously said that drawing is taking a dot for a walk.
 
And I agree.
 
A line is time, process. As a pencil moves forward it leaves its past behind in its trace. At this moment it is the present with infinite possibilities of where to go next.
 
Whichever way the pencil moves brings a new act of creation.
 
This is drawing. This is relationships and this permeates our lives. This is how I think of the world. Everything is held to everything else by lines and an entanglement that is the very fabric of our lives.
 
My paintings draw their inspiration from Byzantium icons, illuminated manuscripts, the work of the artists of the 14th and 17th centuries, particularly Giotto and Poussin, and the more recent de Kooning and Milton Resnick. Having spent countless hours drawing and painting their works, I have learned how to use form, structure and color. 

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​My relationship to color: when I paint, I often look at the canvas and momentarily see a color that is not there. I put it there and it becomes what has been missing.
 
I also taste color—tart, citrus, spicy, etc., which is interesting because my actual ability to taste food and drink is not that sharp.
 
Rhythm in my work is very important. When I paint, I often find myself counting. It is as if I am trying to mark that exact moment—a long downward swish followed by two more on a time measured manner.
 
After years and years of studying and teaching—all these things are coming together in a particular way that I can see happening. It is thrilling.
 
During Covid, my series of paintings called Postcards from the Planet and Paths all join in a plea, a plea to consider our world with renewed wonder, care and respect. These paintings address the climate crisis and our need to take action. Some evoke the rising sun, or perhaps tunnel vision or a setting sun. What we see and cherish are contained within: the land, the sea, and the sky.
 
My love of lines has brought me to trees, springing from the earth, slicing the air, spreading their branches to the sky. They mimic our human movements, becoming distinctive lines of action and emotion. Scientists have discovered that they nurture one another from their underground web of lines.

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​The trees of life.
 
Trees remind me and bring me to thoughts of the tension of gravity pulling us down and our life force pulling us upward. That movement and energy relate to the experience of my life and my painting: the defiance of gravity and the experience of floating in the buoyant air.
 
When I paint, I develop a relationship with the canvas. I usually have an idea that I am wanting to put to paint, but I find that the canvas becomes part of this process. It talks back. What I have already put on the canvas suggests where to go next and sometimes the suggestion, not what I had planned, is emphatic. I don’t listen to it at my peril. I often look at the canvas and see the absent color that I should use next or the form that will complete the composition. It is not there, but I can see it. The canvas or my brain is showing it to me.
 
And, yes. It is an attitude. The emotional surge is let in as a subjective moment, then completely objectified. You are the emotional/subjective conduit, but the canvas is the objective space.
                                               
All our journeys through life have brought us to this place; the roads are varied, but the journey remains in our memories. Lines carry us along these paths, from the past to the present and on into the future.
 
This is my journey through the world.
 
Pictures are magic. They tell an unspoken tale open for different interpretations. There is an element of mystery in viewing a good picture that transcends its own canvas, paint and image. This is why we make art; this is why we create. We want to say something about our world that cannot be said in words.
 
And now I have said enough.
 
These paintings invite you to walk in and wander around.

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All Fears of the Forest are Gone
​Oil on Canvas, 40 x 30;   Louise Victor

Landscaper's Aria
Oil on Canvas, 40 x 30;  Louise Victor

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​Louise Victor is passionate about her work and eager to inspire others to explore their creativity. She attended Northern Illinois University and Graduate School at the University of Minnesota. Her paintings explode with energy, movement and color, evoking worlds that are intriguing and captivating. Louise’s lectures and workshops have been presented at Arts Benicia, Marin MOCA, the ICB, Jen Tough Gallery and The Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley among others. Foundational to Louise’s visual expression is her many years as an aviator. She is the second woman in the world to qualify as a Captain on the Boeing 757/767, capturing in her paintings the “the feeling of the substance of the air, its supporting power, its buoyancy."

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