Sally Veach
Alexandria, Virginia
Solo show Museum of the Shenandoah Valley. Residencies: Vermont Studio Center, Lodestar School of Art, Chateau Orquevaux, Eric Aho Workshop, Weir Farm.
MessageSally Veach is a painter practicing in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia with a BFA from Syracuse University. She explores the restorative effects of the natural world, the sublime power of nature, and her own ancestral heritage. She connects these subjects to global issues such as environment, immigration, and colonization.
Ghosts of a Forgotten Landscape: Paintings by Sally Veach was exhibited at the Museum of the Shenandoah Valley in Winchester, Virginia from July 2019—March 2020. Her painting Harvest Ghost was acquired by the museum and is on view in their Vital Force gallery. She was a panelist for the public discussion, Women in the Arts, with Kathryn Wat, Deputy Director/Chief Curator of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington DC, and Celeste Feta, Director of Education at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA, at the Museum of the Shenandoah Valley.
Residencies include the Vermont Studio Center, Weir Farm National Historic Site, Lodestar School of Art (Ireland). Additional exhibitions include the Delaplaine Arts Center, Frederick, MD, Latela Curatorial, Washington, DC, The Athenaeum, Alexandria, VA, Anne Neilson Fine Art, Charlotte, NC, The Haen Gallery, Asheville, NC, Anne Irwin Fine Art and Thomas Deans Fine Art in Atlanta, GA, and Cheryl McGinnis Gallery, NYC.
Statement
My painting practice is inspired by the natural landscape and ideas about memory, the natural sublime, and the universality of change. Employing these concepts, and the colors of the landscape, I create lush, vibrant paintings full of energetic marks, culminating in an emotional sense of place. Significantly, the work is devoid of people or animals. Often superimposed on these abstracted, gestural compositions are empty icons of human-built structures. They indicate a post-human world.
While closely observing nature, I am reminded that all living things compete for territory. Every thing is in constant motion, even vibrating electrons. Thus, as I vigorously apply marks, I am reminded of the animals, plants, and microorganisms that must battle for the means to survive. Humans have taken this strategy to the extreme. In our quest to thrive at all costs, we have damaged the very ecosystem that sustains us, ensuring that Earth will inevitably become a post-human world.
If you want to read further…
After years of close, observational study of the natural world (and the deteriorating barns of the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia), I have developed a thesis based on concurrent qualities of all life forms and the natural sublime. My goal is to continue exploring these ideas through painting.
Included in the rural landscape that inspires me are man-made structures that hold special interest. They signify that humans are both a part of nature and apart from it. The deteriorating barns of Shenandoah County represent to me the intersection of, and therefor the conflict between, the worlds of Man and Nature. I created a large body of work exploring the omnipotence of nature over man, and the historic migration of my ancestors from Germanic lands in Europe as it relates to the migrating populations of today. This body of work culminated in a year-long exhibition (cut short by Covid-19) at the Museum of the Shenandoah Valley in Winchester, VA.
Continuing to be inspired by the concept of universal migration, my thoughts are returning to the incessant spread of plant life, creating a global condition that some call a New Pangaea. Our contemporary use of the phrase “invasive species” and it’s championing by environmentalists ironically contradicts the progressive encouragement of human migration on the earth. My concept of Flow speaks to the natural and universal migration of all living organisms throughout the earth, a result of the One World that is today’s reality and the inevitable future of the earth as a single Pangaea of life.
And now, with news of melting glaciers and permafrost, and the discovery of planet TOI-1452 b, which is purportedly mostly water, I am currently contemplating a future Earth that could be named Waterworld.