In her upcoming show, The Edge of Darkness at Medicine Man Gallery in Tucson, Arizona, artist Erika Victor explores the wild and desolate places in the Southwest that look like another world.
In preparation for this show, Victor spent time reviewing satellite imagery, searching for specific rock formations that caught her interest. “Usually, it’s volcanic rock that makes things very dark, and I like painting those really dark mountains, and Death Valley has lots of those sorts of areas. I went there, and I liked how barren the landscape is.”
Where the Sun Bakes the Rocks, oil on canvas, 18 x 36 in.
Victor has been traveling throughout the Southwest taking pictures of otherworldly landscapes, including in Death Valley during a super bloom. In one of the new works, Persistence, two flowers spring up and look out of place against the expansive salt flat and grim mountains.
“I don’t like painting a huge amount of vegetation, usually,” says Victor. “I like the bare bones of it…it’s like the skeleton of the earth. You can see all the ancient history in the rocks, whereas a tree or a bush might have only been there for 10 years. There’s something very dramatic about being able to see the whole history in the rocks.”
Persistence, oil on canvas, 18 x 36 in.
Before this exhibition, Victor was painting nocturnes but realized she liked the way the blue-hour light played with the shadows of the mountains and added a drama to her work.
“I like to be out when it’s late evening and right after the sun has set and there’s been so many different times and places, but particularly I was out in the Eastern Sierra a few times in the past couple years, and just anytime right after the sun has set or right before the sun has set, I just think it’s so dramatic and beautiful,” she says.
Traveling to the locations she paints is a crucial part of Victor’s process. “I don’t think I could have my art without all the traveling. I plan things out so much, and then I go to these specific places…and I don’t ever just snap a quick picture and leave. I try to spend a little bit of time in these places,” says Victor.
Overshadowed, oil on canvas, 18 x 36 in.
“I grew up in Kansas where there’s not much landscape to speak of. I always had this idea that I needed to travel to go see something interesting, some sort of interesting landscape, and I think I still kind of have that in my head, that I’m going to go traveling to go find all these different places.”
There is a sense of adventure present in Victor’s work, one that is both grounded in her experiences in the landscape and one that takes place on the canvas. Her surrealist style draws inspiration primarily from the work of old science-fiction illustrations, rather than the surrealist movement.
“I would watch a lot of sci-fi movies and read a lot of books and look at the illustrations…and it’s just so much imagination and imagining different worlds, and I still spend a lot of time looking at old illustrations from the ’60s and ’70s,” says Victor. “I love how unique it is in that I can take that part that maybe someone hasn’t seen before that looks like some other place, and I can put it into my paintings, which are still very grounded in reality—they’re still just a mountain in Death Valley, but then they have this extra little flavor.”
Dark Slopes, oil on canvas, 16 x 20 in.
Victor’s work is a reminder that even when the landscape is stripped of vegetation and visible life, the bones are beautiful and a source of inspiration. The Edge of Darkness opens on October 16 and runs until November 7. —
Medicine Man Gallery 6872 E. Sunrise Drive, Suite 130 » Tucson, AZ 85750 » (520) 722-7798 » www.medicinemangallery.com
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