Photo by Claire Kivior
By Claire Kivior
Contributing writer
Editor’s note: This article is the 13th in a series of articles that will feature all 14 artists who will be participating in the 2019 Open Studios-Botetourt tour on October 26 and 27. Each week leading up to the two-day event, The Herald will feature one artist – highlighting their passion for their chosen artform.
Roanoke Valley native Linda Atkinson is a sculptor, painter, art consultant, fine art appraiser, gallery director, professor, mother, and wife. At just three-years-old, Atkinson began drawing. Her father worked at a paper factory, and would return home each night with various mediums of paper for Atkinson and her sisters to drawl on. “At age six, I conducted art classes in the attic with my sisters. There was never any real question of my becoming an artist. I knew from the very start, when I started drawing.” Atkinson was given coloring books as a child, but she grew tired of coloring in someone else’s drawing. She wanted to create her own.
With her parents blessing, Atkinson left home for Richmond, where she earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts and Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture.
Atkinson described the path of art as a difficult one. She noted that teaching was the obvious next step for her after receiving her degrees, so she travelled to California where she taught a course in women’s studies and sculpture at University of California, Santa Cruz for 13 years. Since then, she has also taught studio arts classes, and art history as a visiting professor at Hollins University, Radford University, Roanoke College, and Virginia Western Community College. During her time at Roanoke College, she served as the gallery director for Olin Gallery for over a decade. Atkinson also runs her own gallery out of her home studio in Fincastle.
As an undergraduate freshman, Atkinson was awarded her own studio. The sculpture studios of Virginia Commonwealth University were “tucked into all these weird places, basements and closets and things.” The studios were not easy to come by then. “I heard that the sculpture department gave out free studios to those who they deemed worthy of it. Second semester I had a show. I thought I needed to get one of my sculptures in the competition for a studio. Long story short, I had been working towards this showcase for months, and I forgot that it was that Friday. I busted through the door, and I was the very last one. I was winded, but they let me present. Who even knows what I said? Something about sin. I sat down, just shaking,” she said. “Then the head of the department got up there and was talking. He said that he’d never seen anything like it, in all four years. He said that I had vision. Someone tapped me and told me that he was talking about me. I didn’t even know freshmen weren’t supposed to enter. I won and got my own studio.”
Atkinson thinks of her work as “visual poems,” with each image a different symbol. For instance, in one of her favorite pieces, Atkinson repeats the images of a house, an apple, a ladder and an iron. The house represents home and belonging. An iron is a symbol of women’s work—a symbol of power, or enslavement based on the viewpoint. An apple represents knowledge, and the ladder symbolizes ascension, or a process. Some of Atkinson’s pieces can take up to four years to complete. She works on many pieces at once. Her work is never done.
The inspiration for Atkinson’s pieces comes from landscape, one of the reasons she moved back to Roanoke. “I am confronted by a stunning landscape every day, and it just feels right. It is home,” she said. However, it is the color relationships she takes most of her inspiration from.
Atkinson is most recognizable for her house series in which she paints 2D landscapes on 3D surfaces. One piece she shared, “Tinkerer,” was constructed from a broken pipe in her home. The sculpture “used to be an abstract, southwestern piece. I had a leak in my garage, and I was so nervous because I looked up there, and it had black rot, and I thought it would cost a lot. So I finally called this fellow. He came out and cut a hole in the ceiling. He told me what pipe it was.” And so, she added it to the house sculpture, becoming the “Tinkerer.”
Her other favorite piece is on display in the Jewish Temple Emanuel. Atkinson was commissioned by the congregation to construct ark doors, which guard the Torah. The end result came in the form of two mahogany doors. Uneducated in Judaism, Atkinson purchased children’s books to teach herself more. She decided to carve the Tree of Life onto the doors, so she could light the leaves, and illuminate the temple’s scrolls. Only upon presenting the finished doors did she learn that just above the ark was a large etz haChayim, a Hebrew word meaning “Tree of Life.’’ Atkinson felt the doors found their rightful home, and she was honored to have her work on display in a sacred place. When her parents came to visit her completed doors, her father shared that her grandfather, a bricklayer, had helped built the Temple of Manuel.
An important lesson Atkinson has learned from her years as an artist is to “be open to what’s going to happen intuitively, or what comes about that you don’t plan.” Atkinson recalled a time when she was forced to enter a piece in a show that she didn’t like, yet it won best in show. “There’s always something, if you make a mistake, just go for it. Don’t force yourself so hard in one direction,” she said.
Atkinson currently has work on display in her home gallery and outside of the Virginia Western Community College library.
She is busy preparing for the upcoming Open Studios-Botetourt tour. More information about the tour can be found at: https://openstudiosbotetourt.com/.
