Traces of Light and Stillness

Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space… I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal being circulate through me. —Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature (1836)

Victoria Veedell’s dreamlike paintings present suspended moments intervals in which light lingers and quietly reshapes the landscape. These works do not describe a specific place so much as evoke a heightened state of attention in the viewer, enchanted and becalmed by: the hush of early morning, the glow just before dusk, and the stillness that settles where land and water meet. Color moves gently across the surface, with the muted blues and warm blushes softened by veils of atmospheric light. Paths, waterways, and horizons appear and dissolve, inviting the viewer to pause and where perception deepens and time seems to slow.

This attentiveness to light and atmosphere situates Veedell within a longer lineage of artists drawn to the expressive potential of landscape. The abstract expressionist painter Mark Rothko, who taught briefly at the California School of Fine Arts (later the San Francisco Art Institute) in the late 1940s, once observed that if natural beauty were the sole criterion, San Francisco would be the capital of the art world. The Bay Area is indeed rich in striking vistas, particularly along its coastlines where land meets water—sites that Veedell interprets memorably and poetically, from the Presidio and the Sausalito Headlands just north of the Golden Gate to the Pacific coast between Point Reyes and Jenner. Unconcerned with topographical accuracy or postcard realism, she distills sketches and photographs of real-world views into painterly syntheses of charged, preternatural light and stillness, capturing both the mood of the entranced observer and the enduring spirit of place.

Veedell’s lyrical, poetic vision harks back to nineteenth-century landscape painters such as George Inness and Caspar David Friedrich, whose work often conveys a sense of spiritual awe rooted in nature—not as the creation of an anthropomorphic god, but as “the sum of the natural and physical laws of the universe,” to quote Spinoza.