Victor Goertz was born and raised in Penticton, and Summerland British Columbia and has resided in the Province since then. Growing up in the Okanagan, he developed a love for the outdoors, hiking and camping. After high school, he enrolled in the Fine Arts program at Okanagan University, in Kelowna. After two years, he graduated with a diploma and received the Florence Bond and Helen Pitt, Vancouver Foundation scholarship. Next was a move to Vancouver to study at what was then called the Emily Carr College of Art and Design, where he majored in painting, graduating in 1984. Since then he has maintained a studio at 1000 Parker Street, Vancouver. In 2006 - 2007 he returned to what is now Emily Carr University to earn his BFA in Fine Arts. Kandinsky was an early influence. This spurred him on to begin a study of the human visual process. Experimenting with shaped canvas, he worked on non-representational compositions in which he explored not only the play of forms, colour, and space within our scope, but the ever changing shape of our peripheral vision as well. During the 90s he studied Computer Graphics and began work as a graphic designer and animator. He moved on and studied Web Design and worked as a web site designer for an ISP company in Vancouver. During the late 90s he renewed his commitment to his artistic expression. Since then he has shifted his subject matter from the non-representational to the abundance found in the natural world, and brought together his studies into human perception with his relationship to the land. The lifetime love of the wild places of British Columbia has taken him on extended trips to explore the land with pastels and sketchbook. Travelling to the Clayoquot, Carmanah, Walbran, Stein Valley, and other unique places and ancient forests. The Art of Seeing ...is a pleasure to learn, living in British Columbia. Working as an artist I must spend time honing my looking skills and studying my observations. That is the first part of the equation, and then it's drawing, and then finally painting. Descartes first wrote about perceiving is a way of acting, something that we do rather than something that is done to us. Each of us registers a combination of personal aesthetics and external signifiers on to any visual scene no matter whether deep within the urban jungle or its greener ancestor. Seeing becomes a tool to learn and instrument to play when it is seeing with intent. What intrigues me is that all of us people are each composing the world to fit with the way that suits us best at the moment as the signifiers closest to what we want to see get brighter and more in focus and what we don't acknowledge reclines. The natural setting as it exists in its many splendid variations throughout British Columbia beckons me and in fact lends itself to apprenticeship into the art of looking and later on to the act of painting. In this ancient sphere of a wilderness environment far removed from the commercialized spaces there is no energy wasted negotiating or blocking the superfluous noise matrix. I can immerse myself much more completely to the point that sight itself is reborn and so it allows me to focus on what is around me in ways my eyes naturally assemble the scene using the figuration of raw, up close nature as the cast. My principle medium is acrylic paint because I enjoy the immediacy of the process. I believe in being open to using as much variety in methodology in application of paint as I can in one piece. How I approach painting is directly related to what I learn through my wilderness expeditions. There I find no uniformity and yet there is a harmony that our minds have the ability to create out of that chaos. I embrace pushing the envelope of interpreting seemingly disaccorded elements and colours onto the same canvas as a challenge that reflects what I and my seeing give to me. Whether it's a deviant colour, an improbably balanced branch, or a thousand other surprises, it's the free radical in the forest that can vault the dialogue from natural to preternatural heights as I can't deny the propensity towards mythologization or even animistic possibilities. It is for the human viewer that I leave with multi-level opportunities to create and identify the signifiers that they choose to. Stepping into the forest one is surrounded by a smorgasbord of colours, forms, smells and textures. And if one hunts enough, you find exceptional spots, where elements of plant, rock, earth and water come together in dramatic fashion - individual actors coming together to play the sum of their parts into prodigious stories. These players may have already taken their bows many years earlier, but the power of their performances with their peers still echo through the woods. One clashes with another, the vanquished split and rotting under its conqueror, who may be in turn upstaged by another. What intrigues me about the natural world is the continual dichotomy between the brutal reality of survival, and the visual beauty of perfect design. I am dedicated to bring these two forces together in my work. And through it all, to provide a vessel for viewers to discover greater insights into the joy of seeing.