Victoria Sebag

Practice

Victoria’s practice is rooted in a sustained engagement with the world immediately around her. Across painting and textile design, she explores colour, pattern and the rhythms of the natural world, continually allowing her surroundings to shape the language of her work.

Her early paintings responded to the changing landscape of London, including the rapid expansion of Canary Wharf in the 1990s. In her thirties, her attention turned closer to home, where still lifes painted from her kitchen became a study in the intimate and familiar. Later, living in Suffolk, she began to explore the possibilities of working on lengths of printed linen.

The shift from canvas to linen proved transformative. Freed from the fixed boundaries of the picture frame, Victoria discovered a greater sense of movement and expansiveness. Pattern could extend beyond the traditional edge of the image, while the printed surface became an active participant in the painting. This experience continues to inform her work today, where the relationship between image, surface and space remains central.

“The magic when creating something two dimensional that becomes a vehicle for the imagination to roam and expand is a constant joy for me. This and the beauty of the world around us is what drives me back into the studio, full of ideas to make new work.”

Victoria’s current paintings focus on the wild plants and flowers of the Suffolk coast. Her observations of the landscape are filtered through a visual vocabulary developed over many years: the decorative language of her textile designs, the formal qualities of Japanese prints, and the enduring influence of William Morris. Natural forms are distilled and reimagined through colour, line and pattern, creating compositions that hover between representation and abstraction.

At the heart of her practice is a fascination with the paradox of painting: the physical flatness of the surface and its capacity to suggest an imagined space beyond it. Line, rhythm, colour and tension become ways of drawing the viewer into the picture, while the implied continuation beyond the edge of the frame gives the work an open, expansive quality.

Victoria’s relationship with painting is also deeply connected to her family history. Her great-grandmother, Annora Bromley-Martin, and her mother, Annabel Gosling, were both professional painters, while her uncle, Professor Christopher Green, is an internationally recognised art historian. This lineage forms part of the context of Victoria’s practice, alongside a distinctly personal response to landscape, colour and the visual world.

Victoria works from her studio in Aldeburgh, Suffolk, where the coastal landscape remains an ongoing source of inspiration. Her paintings invite us to look closely at the natural world, while also encouraging the imagination to move beyond what is immediately visible.