Painting ‘an obsession’ for Victoria Brace
Today and Sunday starting at 10 a.m., you can get up close and personal with the works and personalities of 30 area artists during the Spokane Valley Studio Art Tour. Painter Victoria Brace is among them. Her framed pieces, done in oil on canvas or board, are mostly figurative in an expressionist style.
“It’s like if you read a book, or watch a movie, or listen to a song – there is always a particular feeling you are left with,” Brace said, “After a while, you may not remember the exact details of the story, but you remember that feeling, that aftertaste. I guess that’s what I’m trying to paint.”
Her paintings are moving. Her subjects are ageless and wise, the colors dark and earthy. There is so much emotional depth to her work that standing before one is akin to having an enlightening conversation.
“As I paint, I find that colors carry emotions and tell stories. The brush strokes build up textures, conceal or enhance the previous layers, and things start happening under the surface, as if the painting takes on a life of its own,” she said.
Born in Moscow, Russia, Brace was kept busy as a child with a sketchbook and a pencil. She was exposed to art in old towns, monasteries and art museums. She went on to Moscow College of Art, earning a bachelor of fine arts degree in painting in 1987. After college, she showed and sold her work and taught at an art club in Moscow for several years.
In the early ‘90s she became interested in computer graphics and began working in the industry. About seven years ago, she landed a job at Cyan in Spokane doing computer graphics for games.
“For a while, painting was put on the back burner, but I always knew that one day I had to go back to oils. Painting is an obsession,” she said, “It’s like a chronic disease … never goes away.”
A couple of years ago she began to paint again. She built up a body of work and began participating in juried shows and calls for artists. She has shown a handful of times in the Spokane area, and last year in California. Currently she is showing at McGlade’s at 4301 E. Day Mount Spokane Road in Colbert.
Liberty Lake artist Natalie Gauvin met Brace a couple of years ago. Responding to an Internet ad, Gauvin went to Brace’s North Side home to look at computer equipment. She saw Brace’s work and had to meet the artist, who was painting in her basement studio at the time. Gauvin invited Brace to show at her studio this year during the tour.
Brace paints every day, exercising her eyes, her mind, her spirit and her talent. Her timeless pieces urge a viewer to pause, to think, to question. Her subjects are simple, a child wise beyond years, an elder in possession of youth, a woman and a mask, or bits of an ancient structure where perhaps a part of our history was written.