Virginia Pierrepont was born in New York City and has been an artist all her life. She received her BFA in painting and printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1981. In 1985 she accepted a summer artist in residence program from Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, where she painted and learned the art of Fresco Murals. She established Virginia Designs in 1987, with a studio at 285 West Broadway and Canal, painting Trompe Loeil murals and lanscape paintings. She painted and showed throughout NYC for ten years before moving to Long Island with her family. Virginia’s love of the outdoors and people lead her to Plein Air landscape painting and portraiture, capturing a colorists vision and immediate sense of the great outdoors. She brings this colorful vision into her portraits, which she executes regularly from her new Portrait Studio in Glen Head New York. Virginia is currently enrolled at Johnson State College’s MFA program to continue her artistic venues in studio arts at the Vermont Studio Center.
For me painting is an additive and subtractive process. A straightforward landscape becomes layered with associative memories, paint is scraped away as feelings are dismissed or altered. This process of building and taking away is almost sculptural; with layers of color massed their substance sometimes removed to create form. I am interested in exploring the subconscious levels of emerging memories by actively painting, layering, scraping and erasing perceived images; the unforeseen marks left behind, often blurred and unclear, become metaphors of the struggle to maintain order in life’s revolving chaos. By examining color, line and the symmetry of spaces in nature, I experience an almost meditative balance between what I see and what I feel. For me elements of nature correspond with human emotions. Studying light and shadow in and around natures complicated spaces helps me paint a visual movement that challenges and strengthens my perception of reality. In plein air painting I am often challenged by time and changing light, forcing me to make decisions on different levels and work rapidly through them, often leaving a faint emotional residue behind. A situation becomes memorable when a perceived knowledge of that place collides with a personal experience into that space. These collisions in life, however small are worth exploring; maybe even on an enlarged scale.