Virginia Maitland
Since the age of twelve, Virginia Maitland has never wavered from the life of a full-time painter. She was educated in the 1960s at the distinguished Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and moved to Boulder in 1970. In 1979 she lived and painted in a loft in Soho (NYC), this was a very powerful and transitional period for her work and led to solo shows and group shows in New York. In the1980s she continued to have success with one-person shows in New York City, Atlanta, Dallas, Santa Fe, Aspen, Phoenix and Scottsdale. During the 1990s she has continued to have solo shows in Boulder and
Ft Collins. 

“My paintings have always been involved with the beauty of pure paint and the illusion of three-dimensional space.  Experience of light and space in nature has been my main influence. My first oil paintings at age twelve were landscapes and still lifes. I graduated from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts where I began with academic training in the tradition of Mary Cassatt and Thomas Eakins. There, under the influence of the 1960’s art school experience, I soon moved toward abstraction, influenced by pop art, abstract expressionism and color field painting.   When I moved to Boulder in 1970, I was captured by the light, sky and color of Colorado. Since then I have lived and traveled in many places - England, New York City, Italy, Mexico, Maui, Costa Rica. They all have found their way into my art in one form or another.  Thus it was natural to begin to incorporate into my paintings photographs from my travels.  In addition to the natural landscape, graveyards and churches have always interested me. On a trip to New York City in 1999 I took snapshots early one Saturday morning of Trinity Church graveyard and surrounding buildings on Wall Street, a scene memorialized in countless mass media images after 9/11.  What I discovered was that I like the way the light and shadows play in these richly meaningful settings.  I have been able to combine my formal and expressive interests, which play out in my purely abstract paintings, with the emotional sense of place that photographs bring to the total image. Currently I find that both styles nurture each other.”