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| metro art by Megan Voeller |
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Artist Profile: Victoria Block
August and September may be the height of summer in Tampa Bay, but Victoria Block’s vibrant landscape paintings transport viewers to eternal spring. The Montrealer’s sweeping vistas prompt comparisons with French Impressionists and Romantic landscape painters. Inside the climate-controlled galleries of the Gulf Coast Museum of Art, they provide an enticing escape from the heat.
Victoria Block, Fall
Victoria Block: Narrations
through September 28
Gulf Coast Museum of Art
Artist Victoria Block at work
Though Block spends most of the year in Canada, she calls Largo home during snowbird season. Morning walks along Indian Rocks Beach and visits to the Florida Botanical Gardens are two of her favorite local pastimes. Last year, after approaching GCMA with her portfolio of artwork, Block received an offer for a solo exhibition. Since then, she has worked on a grand scale to produce work large enough to fill the expansive galleries.
The results include seven paintings—one 24-ft. wide and another 15-ft. wide—of colorful, fecund landscapes inspired by her grandmother’s garden in Montgomery, Ala. Childhood encounters with the South’s teeming floral life inform the images, which are composed from memory using thick applications of oil paint stick that threaten to spill off the page and bloom into real space.
“My view of nature is the sublime,” said Block. Her hand-built ceramic vessels complement the paintings and extend the color and texture into the third dimension.
Victoria Block: Narrations runs through September 28 at the Gulf Coast Museum of Art, 12211 Walsingham Rd., Largo. For more information, call 727-518-6833 or go to gulfcoastmuseum.org.
—Megan Voeller |
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