Victoria Chick

Although I gained skills through degree –seeking, I did not have life experiences that gave me a reason to say anything I felt important until I began doing art therapy with elderly people, most of whom were sedentary. I discovered there are myriad emotions expressed in sitting. My work setting required confidentiality, so the quick line drawings I did were observations only of gesture with no facial features. In the evening I would select some gesture drawings to be used in large paintings expressing the emotion I saw in the gesture. My compositions were based on diagonals, themselves unsettling, and a division between the human figure and a sub-conscious , metaphoric representation of the figure’s emotional place. A straight line, as well as color or tonal contrast of negative spaces each side of the line, suggest a demarcation between life and thought. Many times there will be overlap between the areas suggesting a partially realized connection. The focus on gesture carried over to images of cats, models of which I had many, living in my barn. My interest in gesture combined with seeing human relationships as I drew cat images and arranged them in po situations on the canvas. I worked for years on this series’ potential before expanding the subject to now include human figures with the cats. After retiring from teaching and moving to New Mexico, the cat image became a metaphor of me discovering and feeling exhilarated by this fascinating southwest state.

I was born in 1944 in rural Minnesota and attended a four room grade school where all the teachers in all the grades used art as a teaching tool for every subject. Learning visually became a natural practice and started my path toward an MFA, being an artist, teaching, and community involvement. Adjunct teaching gave me time to pursue work in my studio. But I heard about Art Therapy in the late 1970s. Few schools then offered degrees, so I apprenticed myself to a Registered Art Therapist and was grandfathered in as an ATR. In working with older people I saw personality types and coping mechanisms that seemed important in living successfully or not, while aging. I began to incorporate what I was observing into my paintings. Moving to the San Diego, California area, I was offered a year’s position as art history lecturer at the University of San Diego. I moved to Palomar College in San Marcos.Ca. teaching art history and studio classes for thirteen years before retiring and moving to Silver City, New Mexico. All my experiences have coalesced in New Mexico in founding a project called Southwest Regional Museum of Art and Art Center, a member of the American Alliance of Museums. My art collection is now part of the Museum’s permanent collection currently traveling in outreach programs with a docent to requesting schools while the Museum buiding is being constructed.

2-D, Drawing, Printmaking/Lithography