Valerie studied photography before moving more fully into painting. Photography taught her to see through composition, cropping, light, shadow, contrast, and the relationships between elements within a frame. She still loves those qualities, but painting eventually gave her a more complete way to express herself. Where the camera once allowed her to remain safely behind the lens, painting asks her to put herself directly onto the surface.

Her work is not autobiographical in a literal sense. Instead, her experience enters through color, gesture, writing, memory, emotion, nature, and the way she responds to the world around her. She hopes her paintings reward time and repeated looking… that something small might catch the viewer’s attention, reveal itself slowly, or create a feeling that is difficult to name.

For Valerie, there is no final point at which the work is completely figured out. Each painting becomes part of an ongoing process of learning how to trust her own hand, balance control with freedom, and recognize when a painting has said enough.

Valerie Lorraine is an abstract and mixed-media painter living and working in North Carolina. She paints because it feels necessary… a physical and emotional need to take what is happening inside her and give it somewhere to go. What began with house paint brushed onto a scrap of roofing tar paper became a way to step outside the emotional messiness of everyday life and into a place where color, movement, and gesture could become another voice.

Valerie’s paintings are built through an ongoing conversation with the surface. She rarely begins with a completely resolved image. Instead, she starts with a mark, a color, a piece of handwriting, a gesture, or an impulse and responds to what happens next. Layers accumulate through adding, covering, uncovering, and making choices. Sometimes those choices are deliberate; sometimes they are an attempt to let go of control. The history of those decisions remains embedded in the painting, even when much of it is eventually hidden.

She is particularly drawn to the raw energy of a first mark… the moment before self-consciousness and overthinking take over. Her challenge is to preserve some of that immediacy while building enough structure and complexity for the painting to hold the viewer’s attention. She is not interested in surface beauty for its own sake, or in work that feels manufactured or predetermined. She wants the painting to feel alive.

Handwriting is central to Valerie’s process. She has kept journals since high school, and writing was once her primary creative outlet. In her paintings, words may be readable or may dissolve into asemic marks, but they begin as something real: a thought, a memory, anxiety, a line from a poem, an experience of loss, or simply something she needed to get out of her head. Her handwriting becomes a visual record of the person who was there making the work.

Valerie studied photography before moving more fully into painting. Photography taught her to see through composition, cropping, light, shadow, contrast, and the relationships between elements within a frame. She still loves those qualities, but painting eventually gave her a more complete way to express herself. Where the camera once allowed her to remain safely behind the lens, painting asks her to put herself directly onto the surface.

Her work is not autobiographical in a literal sense. Instead, her experience enters through color, gesture, writing, memory, emotion, nature, and the way she responds to the world around her. She hopes her paintings reward time and repeated looking… that something small might catch the viewer’s attention, reveal itself slowly, or create a feeling that is difficult to name.

For Valerie, there is no final point at which the work is completely figured out. Each painting becomes part of an ongoing process of learning how to trust her own hand, balance control with freedom, and recognize when a painting has said enough.