Virginia Stroud is an Native American artist renown for her paintings of the female figure. Virginia Stroud was born in Madera, California in the year 1951. Stroud is of Cherokee and Creek descent was raised in Oklahoma with a Kiowa background.
Stroud attended Bacone Junior College located in Muskogee, Oklahoma. She went on to attend the University of Oklahoma located in Norman. She studied elementary education and art.
The artist has won numerous awards from Native American Art appreciation organizations.
Stroud works in oils and acrylics and is also an avid printmaker.
Price range information: No pricing available on originals. Prints can be found from $50 to $500.
I enjoy the minimalist aspect of Stroud’s artwork. Though she doesn’t paint facial features, we get a feeling of the emotional pitch of her figures from the depictions of their bodies. Her horses are also very simple and elegant.
The artist is a Native American member of the Cherokee Indian from Oklahoma and mother of Scott and Irish decent from Syracuse, New York.
A short clip showing the artist talking about her work Primavera or “springtime.”
The artist talking about her series featuring Chief Joseph that was done in the mid 1970.
The artist includes a variety of themes in her works from realism, to abstract expressionism, and conceptualism. The artist was born in 1935 in Syracuse, New York. The artist attended Beaver college in Pennsylvania finishing college in 1959. She also attended the Pratt Institute.
Walkingstick was also a professor at the collegiate level teaching at Cornell University from 1988 until 2005.
The artist works with a variety of mediums including oils, acrylics, gold and silver leaf, encaustic, and copper.
For her designs she enjoys using the diptych format. Its perfect for her as she is bi racial and enjoys seeing the human figure as a landscape. On many of these works the figure is seen as a silhouette next to a more traditionally painted landscape. Both sides of the artist are seen as different but able to exist together as well. The works are very large in size from sixty and seventy inches on a side.
The artist is part of several museum collections including the National Museum of Canada, the Israel Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the San Diego Museum of Art.
From her artistic statement we can learn she sees the landscapes as a stand in for her own body. She uses gold and silver leaf to further portray her emotions of the moment she is looking at the landscape. The artist traveled back and forth to Italy many times during the 1990s and 200s visiting Rome as well as the Vatican.
Walkingstick loves to paint mountains. On her native american side the mountains represent the gods. Mountains are given a great deal of respect and honor in the Native American culture.
The artist likes to play with different visual textures. Painting one side with acrylic and the other with oils. One side thick one side thin. One side a majority of gold leaf with very little paint, the other side just the opposite. If you see an artist that uses mixed media such as gold and silver leaf make sure and step back and move left to right. Notice how the picture seems to move with so many reflection of light. Other artists who use mixed media in harmony with gold and silver leaf are Brad Kunkle, Robert Kushner, and Fred Wessel.
For some art homework how about trying a diptych of your own. A picture with two panels. For example paint one side in the winter and the other side the same area int a different season. Try to exaggerate the colors associated with that time of year.
Diattaart Blog 