Victoria Ball is a British-born artist and illustrator who lives and works in Somerset. She began her training in painting and drawing at Cheltenham College of Art in the late nineties and went on to study at Falmouth College of Arts, gaining a first-class honours degree in Illustration in 2002.
Victoria established a career as an illustrator, producing artwork for book jackets, children’s books and TV, limited edition prints, magazines, ceramics, packaging and branding for clients all over the world.
In 2017 she turned to fine art painting. In her latest body of work, she explores the shape of her local countryside – particularly the Cotswolds, where she grew up, Somerset, where she lives now, and the Dorset coast – responding to the sense of place with colour and texture in a non-figurative way. Expansive landscapes and big skies have always inspired Victoria. “My main goal is to achieve a sense of calm and space within my work, in the same way that physically placing yourself in these landscapes would do.”
“I am fascinated by negative space and the way in which colours affect one another,” Victoria explains. “My paintings are as much about what I take out as what I leave in.” Her panels begin life full of gestural marks and colourful, expressive brush strokes, which she applies to evoke the essence and shape of the landscape. Then she starts to block in colour with thicker, more textural paint, masking out areas of the panel. It is a back and forth process – adding in crisp areas of colour, then taking some away and making adjustments as each new colour affects the one placed next to it – until she’s happy with what remains. “I hope to leave this process as a visible journey in the final work.”
Victoria’s work is exhibited regularly, including most recently in the group show Three Point Turn at Kobi & Teal in Frome. She also exhibited with Kobi & Teal in Frome and in London in 2018 and 2017, and at Andelli Art in Wells in 2019 and 2018. Victoria had a sell-out show at her first Battersea Affordable Art Fair in 2019.
