Victor Goertz was born and raised in British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley. An adventurous boy, he quickly developed a love for the outdoors, hiking and camping as a result of his upbringing in the small towns surrounded by the wilderness of the Interior. In addition to his outdoor explorations, Victor was drawing from a young age, always carrying a sketchbook and pencil.
Victor earned a Fine Arts diploma from Okanagan University in Kelowna, then went on to earn his Bachelor of Fine Arts at Emily Carr University in Vancouver. He expanded his skillset in the early 1990s by immersing himself into the emerging world of computer graphics, working as a graphic designer, animator, as well as web site design. Then after returning to ECU to earn his Bachelor Degree, Victor recommitted his focus back to painting by 2000.
Victor’s return to painting was also a return to the landscapes he held so dear. Though currently based in Vancouver, Victor prioritizes his extended trips to explore the provincial wilderness, documenting it all with pastels and his sketchbook. Influenced by Rene Descartes’ philosophy of seeing as being an action we perform rather than a passive occurrence done to us, Victor’s landscape paintings are a journal of his mental voyage to find new stories deep within the woods or shoreline. Stories that we all know innately. His body of work is a documentation of BC’s diverse and ancient landscapes, through which Victor transports the viewer into an immersive storytelling experience – of battles fought, lost or won, with a cast of rock, tree, water and earth. His medium of choice is acrylic paint. And uses it to share the dichotomy of nature: between the brutal reality of survival and the visual beauty of perfect design. Through colour, texture and composition, Victor exposes our relationships between the act of seeing and the act of recognizing the visual markers to recreate our own individual allegories using the inherent beauty of BC's natural world to do so.
Victor has participated in many solo and group exhibitions throughout the years. He is represented in collections in Canada, USA, and Europe.
