Sunderland based artist Virginia Bodman will complete an art marathon this week, opening three new exhibitions with over 40 paintings - tracing a decade of her work.
The new exhibitions present Virginia’s work from 1995 to 2005. Sea, a joint exhibition with popular North-East landscape artist Robert Soden opened this week at the Red Box Gallery (Newcastle); Full Volume, is at the Globe Galleries from Saturday (November 25). The Globe Galleries are two interconnected contemporary art galleries; the Globe City Gallery (Newcastle) and the Globe Hub Gallery (North Shields).
Virginia is a senior lecturer in Fine Art at the University of Sunderland. She has exhibited her work internationally and has been based at the university since 1990. Virginia was the first ever Durham Cathedral Artist in Residence (1983-84).
In Sea, Virginia presents a collection of large paintings and drawings of dramatic forms developed from the energy and potential of the natural world. Three of the four works on show at the Red Box Gallery are based on rubbings that she made directly onto canvas with charcoal from wave formations left by the receding sea on the beaches at Spittal, near Berwick-on-Tweed and The Bents, Sunderland.
The paintings in the Full Volume exhibitions, at the Globe Galleries, are based on a rich mixture of interests that include Virginia’s family, the landscape of her childhood and historic houses. Her paintings, which can take several years to complete, make reference to a range of visual sources that include heraldry, elaborate and arcane furnishings and objects from the natural world.
She said: “The three exhibitions are happening all at once by chance rather than by design. When you consider it can take five years to complete one painting, I couldn’t really have planned it!
“But these exhibitions are connected. If you go to see the drawings in the Sea exhibition, for instance, and then go to see the paintings on exhibition in Full Volume, you can see how that work has developed from drawing to painting in terms of scale, space and colour.”
Sea is at the Red Box Gallery, St Nicholas Chare (the old Post Office building), Newcastle until January 11, 2007. Full Volume, is at the Globe City Gallery on Carliol Square, Newcastle and the Globe Hub Gallery, on Howard Street, North Shields both until January 13, 2007.