Victoria Bein

Touille’s Camouflage
pastel and carbon pencil; 25.25 x 25.25 in.

My work integrates and resolves conflicts of both the inner and outer world. Ideas develop in stages with simple line drawings. Objects I’ve collected and brought into the studio are often incorporated into the ‘landscape’ forming relationships between content from memory and my encounters with various environments, animals and people. Themes develop as shapes communicate and are broken or rearranged in search of place. Lines intersect and reveal hidden content, patterns and possibilities for negative and positive space. The choice of using carbon pencil and pastel on paper allows me to emphasize drawing’s linear marks ranging from bold to barely visible and to build a rich surface of intricate texture and shading. Key to my vision and compositions are palette restriction, layering, and the creation of transparency within forms. Personal iconography and symbolic mark-making enrich my work. Although each drawing goes through a series of transformations , I seek to maintain the impulse of the initial sketch by retaining much of the foundational primitive line -the unconscious source. Each final piece reflects my journey blending representational elements with abstraction; finding unity and harmony in the chaos of fragments.