Victoria Block

The work in short

To be a landscape painter at a time when the merits of conventional forms of painting are being reassessed is a challenge. Canadian landscape artist Victoria Block has, however, found a way to bridge the gap between the traditional connotations of landscape art and the post-modern state of contemporary painting.

Block paints mainly large-scale mixed-media works on canvas. She applies a combination of oil paints, oil pastels, and sand media to her canvases in a manner that is reminiscent of both Seurat’s pointillism and Pollock’s abstract expressionism. What is of primary importance in Block’s painting technique is the way in which this method affects the viewers’ visual interpretation of her works.

Although it is apparent that Block’s subject is nature, there is a distinctly abstract quality to her work, one which is not traditionally associated with landscape art. In this way, Block has managed to capture the essence of nature, to convey its shapes, its colours, its textures and make it recognizable without having to rely on traditional means of representation.