Colour, Nature, Painting & Textiles
Vicky Chapple, known as VickyArtsAndCraftsV, creates work that celebrates colour, nature, and the joy of making.
Working across painting, textiles, and mixed media, her practice is rooted in lived experience—from wandering through flower fields to teaching students of all ages. In this interview, she reflects on instinctive colour, the influence of teaching on her creativity, and the quiet power of art to interrupt the everyday with moments of wonder.
Colour in your work feels expressive and abundant — are you responding more to what you see in nature, or what nature makes you feel?
It is an expression of the place, the ambiance and general vibe I felt at the time of my visit. For example, for my solo exhibition entitled: Beautiful Open Spaces, I spent a day there in Worcestershire with a friend photographing the different angles and areas of the huge field of brightly coloured delphiniums. It was wonderful and really captured my imagination. Each large acrylic artwork took around four days to create, and each has at least four paint layers to add to the feeling of looking through the different angles of the field.
You work across painting, textiles and mixed media. How do you decide which material a new idea belongs to?
I tend to go in long phases of acrylic painting on canvas or board. Other phases are collage, mixed-media, or wet felting and working into it with found objects and different textures and metal.
Nature appears again and again in your practice. What keeps drawing you back to fields, flowers and landscapes?
I love nature and its colours; they inspire me every time. Nature takes me far away and when I see something that captivates me, I can’t wait to produce it in an artwork. I used to take a great many photos (even more than I do now) and I have a file portfolio of photos on Alamy.com (Vicky Chapple). Painting again really grew from there. I think my head was so full of images that they had to come out!
Your palette is bold and confident. Is colour an instinctive choice for you?
Yes, these are the colours that I see. Beautiful bold and dramatic colours to describe what I have seen and felt in a place. They are instinctive and acrylic paint is very suited to them. I do sometimes combine acrylic and oil paint to achieve the best results to represent a particular place.
You’ve exhibited in galleries, public spaces and city centres. How does creating work for public settings change your relationship with the audience?
To see people peruse the artwork is a quiet pleasure, a real sense of wonder, almost like a newborn baby! It’s taken in and accepted, talked about, viewed. It’s always intriguing. There is a difference: artwork in a gallery where people have decided to attend and view art, as opposed to public art which might gather people who would never have chosen to view any artwork. I love that! An opportunity to alter the everyday, to give something unusual, to break the possible humdrum, to maybe grab someone who wouldn’t otherwise have engaged with art.
Public art lives with weather, time and people passing by. What do you enjoy most about releasing control in those environments?
I’m not sure I can answer this question; I think a better artist to ask is the wonderful Henry Moore! Now, his sculptures certainly has weathered time and fashion and are as relevant today as when he first created them!
As both an artist and a lecturer, how do teaching and making inform each other?
Over the decades, I have taught many aspects of art and craft which is why I name myself Vicky ArtsAndCraftsV. I’ve loved the many challenges of providing classes for 16–21-year-olds in a college, to taking sessions for Early Years all the way up to 90 years of age! Each age group has its own requirements and restrictions and so it has informed my choice of materials, tools, and tech. This has flowed through into my own art. Starting from the necessity of providing relevant and inclusive classes, I have found so much joy in the various materials that many times they have carried over into my own. For example: the wet felting techniques in 2017 for adult students at the college within a crafting term. This leaked over into my own work, and I used it to describe my snorkelling adventures at the age of 16 years, then a scuba dive five years later. It helped me create the atmosphere of being under the sea and being surrounded by an entirely different world. Working with the wet felting helped me express how I felt. This year a student wants to venture into representing architecture – this is an area I have never represented in my paintings. So, through her request I have researched, started sketching local places of interest and am now working on a medium size painting. Thanks to her, I have ventured into a new area! I’m loving the challenge, improving my perspective work, and producing a very different type of painting.
What’s something your students have taught you that’s influenced your own creative practice?
It’s wonderful to teach a subject I love! The passion never dies and their demands and requests and questions keep me fresh! Always researching new ideas and methods, trialling them, showing the students who often look on SM and combining the outcomes. It’s a good spiral of information! Many of them persevere and produce remarkable pieces.
Textiles bring a sense of touch into your work. What does fabric allow you to express that paint alone doesn’t?
Paint and fabric are so different, I enjoy both. I have always loved beautiful fabric, interior design, and clothes! Like many people I keep a little stash of gorgeous fabrics – something I can’t explain takes me to them and yes, it is a form of expression and description. This can be seen more recently in my Hansel and Gretel fabric piece, although it is framed in a painted frame continuing the children’s story.
Your work often feels joyful and optimistic. Is that an intention?
Colour is joyful and optimistic! It’s so pleasant to look at, and uplifting. I work well in colour as I find it cheering as I work! I think, sometimes, we (as artists) can be bogged down with things and when I paint, I surround myself with colour which buoys me up!
When you begin a new piece, what excites you most — the subject, the materials, or the possibilities of colour?
I think it is always the subject which leads me to the resources to best describe the piece or pieces, and I go through long phases of painting so usually it is through paint that I create my artwork. Other forms are collage which I find most useful to describe something that needs or took energy to do as in my Gang Man (exhibited in the Herbert Museum & Art Gallery, 2016) which described the horrific attack on innocent young people at a concert in a theatre in Paris, 2015. The act of ripping conveys the violence; the choice of newspaper cuttings provided the further information.
If one of your artworks could be experienced as a walk-through of nature, what kind of journey would it be?
That’s a great question, in fact, I wonder if it would be good in a light display! A friend and I went to Warwick Castle Christmas lights and there were several multi-coloured tunnels! I think one with the colours of Unity would really express the overall feeling of joy, elevation and freedom!
After years of exhibiting and teaching, what still feels fresh or unexplored in your practice?
Constantly still learning! I feel I never know enough! There are always new ways of creating something, honing my skills – can’t help but still learn. I think it would feel a very dull world if I felt I had nothing left to learn!
What do you hope lingers with viewers after they’ve spent time with your work?
I hope that they can connect to it, feel the need to see it again, and hopefully purchase it!
