Featured Artist

Recently-elected President of the Loudoun Sketch Club, Virginia Treviranus is not only a veteran painter but a long-time community activist and volunteer.

Virginia has lived in Loudoun since 1966. She has always had a special affection for the land, and she has traveled extensively through it, first on horseback and then as a painter. As a member of the Loudoun Hunt, she rode for miles and miles through the rural countryside; as a painter, she has watched much of that countryside disappear, sometimes rushing to paint it just as the bulldozers arrive on site. Years ago, driving by an impressive hillside of trees, she made a mental note to paint the scene some day. That idea was hurried along a short time later when she noticed several bulldozers gathered at the bottom of the hill. "I rushed over there the next day to paint those trees, and two days later they were gone," she recalls.

Painting the land has other challenges as well. "The trick is to find a path through the landscape, as far as the eye can see," she explains. "The idea is to create the sense of looking miles and miles off into the horizon, making a three dimensional scene believable in a two-dimensional format."

Although she laments the loss of open land to development, she believes she has an obligation as an artist to capture it "while it's still here," and she encourages other Sketch Club artists to join her in this important mission.

A member artist of King Street Studios in Leesburg, Virginia likes to work from sketches she accomplishes on location that she later translates to oil paintings. She is also a member of the Loudoun Arts Council, the Loudoun Library Foundation, the Rust Library Advisory Board and the Loudoun County Art Advisory Group. An award-winning painter, Virginia has work in many private and public collections, including the Loudoun County Government Center.