VIRGINIA BELSER
Virginia has been engaged with art ever since she can remember…. from Saturday classes as a child at the local university to having her own cubby in 3rd grade for storing her creations. High school experiences included her first forays into life drawing, sculpture and learning the medium of oil paint.
Majoring in watercolors in college, Virginia’s senior thesis focused on the tension created by trying to describe vast space while using a minimum of painterly details.
She first discovered the medium of pastels in the mid 1990’s. After a painting hiatus focused on raising her sons, she returned to pastels in the mid 2000’s. During those years, as her young boys were still a priority, her painting efforts occurred mostly on vacations or during intensive workshops. A two year stint in coastal North Carolina provided Virginia with several engaging landscape challenges.
A more recent move in the summer of 2020 brought Virginia to the saturated light of the Sonoran Desert in Tucson. She is embracing the challenge of a vast new landscape and an entirely different palette.
Currently she is an Artist Membe of and serves as Secretary to the Sonoran Plein Air Painters Board. She is an active participant with the Tucson Pastel Society and maintains active member status with the Arizona Pastel Society and the Central Pennsylvania Pastel Society.
Virginia is a signature member and served a three year term as president of the Central Pennsylvania Pastel Society, and had memberships with the Central Pennsylvania Farmland Preservation Artists, the Pastel Society of North Carolina, The Pastel Society of Western New York, and the Wilmington Art Association. She has shown and sold her work in several juried exhibits in the Tucson area, the central Pennsylvania area and southeastern coastal North Carolina
