Artist statement
Virginia Fitzgerald has a magical ability to make the ordinary, extraordinary. In her world, the inner workings of a pear, a coffee cup, a tube of paint or a duck, are coaxed up to its surface in a smart and staggering blend of color that literally stops the viewer in his tracks. Virginia’s world is the world of bottomless potential, of whimsy and wonder, and of mystery. She knows how to charm simple inner secrets up to the surface where we all get a chance to see with the powerful X-Ray Vision of Potential that Fitzgerald seems to walk the earth with.
The result? A world of work with a physical energy and paradigm-shifting color that envelopes the viewer like a mother hugging her child. There is joy, there is play, there is joix de vivre. And there is a celebration of the regular and overlooked that gives a new “sit up and listen” voice to the ordinary elements of everyday life. Just as a mother introduces the world to a child, here Virginia (a mother herself) shows us the world anew. We can almost hear the mother-to-child conversation inside each of these paintings. “Look—closer—look inside of it---see?!” Only in this case, the child is the child in all of us—that part of us that still remembers how to lose our breath over the simplest of observations.
It’s the limitlessness of Fitzgerald that makes the range of her work so vast and explosive. A wide and abundant merry-go-round of media seem to speak to her– from wall murals to bottle caps, from illustration to acrylics on canvas to furniture, to painted fabric and even aluminum walkers! Part of the magic is the way in which this wide range of art media enhance one another so fully and richly. The message emerges bright and clear, rebounding off one piece and onto the next:
Look closer--the world around you, in all its abundance and variation, is nothing short of astounding. Let’s celebrate!
Virginia’s brave and buoyant work has been shown and sold around the globe, from Europe to Japan, to the Whitney Museum gift shop in New York City. If you go to see her work, go prepared to be WOWed with color, delight, and your own sense of your very own astonishment, remade anew.
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