Valerie Travers Artspan Studio Visit VL vol 3 no 8 August 2014

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August 2014 Volume 3 No. 8

VISUAL LANGUAGE contemporary fine art

Valerie Travers

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Valerie Travers Treasured Island

With water on all sides, Valerie Travers stays connected.

by Dave Justus

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Artspan Studio Visit Valerie Travers

“I work standing up, since I paint almost exclusively on canvas,” Valerie Travers says, describing her artistic process. “But then, I hardly sit down in the course of a day in any case. Once I’m absorbed and a painting is going well, I lose all sense of time. I tend to keep going until I drop!”

Travers can trace that tenacity back more than five hundred years, through a family tree that took root in Guernsey, a tiny island off the coast of Normandy, in the 1400s. A bailiwick of the British Crown, the land covers barely 30 square miles floating in the English Channel, but it has provided all the foundation Travers needed to become the artist, and the person, she is today.

“I have always loved water,” she says—little wonder, as it surrounds her on all sides. From growing up on the island, she believes, “my love of the sea is firmly embedded in my very being, and in my work. As a child I spent the summer on the beach, swimming and making sandcastles with moats, trying desperately to stop the walls from crumbling when the tide rushed in.”

Those toppling sandcastles were an early bellwether for what awaited her when she first moved into her current house on Guernsey. “I am living in my Great Aunt Alice’s home,” she notes. Travers bought the fixer-upper from family, feeling a connection to the homestead, and has lived there more than 28 years. “I was very close to Auntie Alice. She adored animals, loved her garden, and was a dressmaker by trade… we just fitted together so well. So being here means such a lot to me, and I know that she is pleased I’m here, looking after things as she would wish and making it into the home it is today.”

The house, and the island itself, seems imbued with the long family history that has shaped Travers and her work. “I have the old values and the sense of belonging to this island, and always will,” she says. From far back, her family had always been growers, farmers, and fishermen, living off the food they caught or cultivated. Her great grandfather was once awarded a cup for a prize cow by no less a luminary than Queen Mary.

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After the war, her RAF veteran father wed her mother and bought a home with greenhouses.

“It was a hard life,” she recalls. “They worked all hours, as all of my relatives did, but the fun they had and the laughs they shared I will always remember. Hard work doesn’t mean hardship, does it? Sometimes, the simple life is the best.”

The family penchant for hard work pushed her to excel in her studies, attend night school for shorthand and typing, and try her hand at a variety of careers, from surgeon’s P.A. to a secretary for a legal firm and the police force. “But there was always something missing,” she says. “I knew I was not totally fulfilled.” Her childhood creativity—explorations into art, music, crafts, equestrianism, and other activities—had not yet found a way to bloom through the concrete of adult life.

Perhaps it was her lifelong love of the water that first prodded her to dab a brush into watercolors.

“It was a ‘Eureka’ moment,” she says of the occasion, now more than two decades past, when she first took up painting seriously. “I had found the missing link at last. I fitted it in between looking after my children and running the home, and always found time to pick up a brush, even if it meant starting my day an hour earlier.”

When watercolors began to lose their luster, she moved on to oils, which she still employs enthusiastically. Though not initially enamored of pastels, she later gave them another chance and found that they were the perfect tool for capturing the images and emotions she wanted to express on the canvas. While she currently focuses on acrylics and oils, she is quick to point out that every medium has its advantages “I believe that artists reach for colors intuitively,” she says of selecting her tools. “In my opinion, being self-taught has allowed my expression to come through at a steady pace and gradually develop into my own personal style.” Though she feels she is still developing as an artist, she notes, “I do enjoy painting a variety of subjects, but there is a definite leaning toward certain colors and the way I apply paint.”.

Right: Stairway to Heaven

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Artspan Studio Visit Valerie Travers

Gently Receding

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Leafy Entanglement

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Artspan Studio Visit Valerie Travers

Rushing In

Symphony in Blue

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Travers shares her studio space with a rescue dog, Truffles, as well as three cats who occasionally check on her progress. Though she sometimes paints with mood music, often she will let herself be inspired by the sounds of Guernsey itself: rustling trees and singing birds. The cumulative effect is a sense of peace in the room that finds its way into her art.

“Paintings often appear out of nowhere,” she says. “I just pick up a brush and see what develops. Occasionally I choose to paint a particular scene that has captured my imagination, but even then I allow myself artistic license to change parts of the piece if necessary.” Over time, as her style has developed and changed, Travers has managed to surprise even herself. “For the past two years or so, I have felt the need to paint abstracts. If anyone had told me that I would be

an abstract artist, I would have said that was the furthest thing from my mind. But I enjoy the process so much; it’s totally liberating and releasing.

So here I am today, painting abstracts alongside my seas and skies.”

Travers’ star continues to rise in the art world, with Best in Show awards both locally and internationally, along with representation from Davis & Co. Fine Art Gallery in Houston, Texas. Even so, back on Guernsey, she does what her family has always done, working hard and living life as simply as she can, raising her two sons on the same beaches where she once left her footprints, refining her art and discovering who she is.

Even on a tiny island, Valerie Travers has plenty of exploring left to do.

Valerie’s Great Grandfather with Queen Mary

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Artspan Studio Visit Valerie Travers

Fresh as a Daisy 20 x 20

Letting the Sunshine In

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Artspan Studio Visit Valerie Travers

Glowing

Evening Flight

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Beneath the Surface

Deep Within 30 x 40

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