Exhibition

A Tribute to Star Varner

Longtime SGCI member, Star Varner, passed away in February of this year. Over the summer I was contacted by Wendy Calman, one of Star’s mentors at Indiana University who planted the seed for this tribute. Wendy put me in touch with Star’s spouse, Kenny Sheppard, professor of music and conductor, who generously put in hours compiling and reformatting images of Star’s work for this feature.

Star was an accomplished printmaker and painter whose career spanned decades. This feature focuses primarily on a body of work begun late in her career where she moved away from the naturalistic figurative work she was known for and instead documented and translated the skillset of her own body as she reconnected with the trick roping she learned in her youth, working rodeos. She would cover a cotton rope with charcoal or pigment and pass the rope over paper or plates, leaving a record of the rope’s movement on the piece. In series like Crossed Paths she would create rope marks on copper plates, then translate the charcoal record into engraved lines that could be editioned with multiple impresions atop each other. That act of making the ephemeral indelible is at once integral to printmaking and an apt metaphor for how Star left a legacy from her brief life.

My priority as Graphic Impressions coordinator is always to bring attention to the diversity of approaches to printmaking, the risks printmakers take in their creative practice, and the joy of making. Centripetal Forces, Star’s body of trick roping work, is an outstanding example of a printmaker taking the leap out of her comfort zone while embracing that joy. That she was brave enough to make that change as a well established artist is all the more admirable. Below is Star’s obituary in full, followed by an artist statement, interspersed with her work and a few process photos of her trick roping for the Centripetal Forces body of work.

Star is just one of our extended print family we’ve lost recently. An In Memoriam would be a welcome addition to a future editions of Graphic Impressions. Please share those we’ve lost who should be recognized by sending me an email: bsanders@sgcinternational.org

–Blake Sanders, Graphic Impression Coordinator

The artist stands over a brown ring, spinning a chalk covered lasso, leaving impressions of the spinning rope on the brown ring, using the lasso as a drawing tool, documenting the motion.

Star Varner at Crown Point Press

Obituary

Victoria Star Varner died on February 25, 2024 in her home in Georgetown TX, surrounded by her loving family. After her diagnosis of a terminal brain cancer in 2022, she maintained a positive attitude and inspired others with her expressions of gratitude for the life she was allowed to live and the many wonderful people in her life.

Born April 9, 1955, Star, as she preferred to be called, grew up in a family that produced rodeos and provided trail rides on horseback at Lake of the Ozarks, Missouri. She worked alongside her parents and siblings in this endeavor, joining her brother and sister in a trick-roping performance in the evenings and leading trail rides during the days. She became interested in art at an early age and decided to pursue university degrees in art, leaving the western world behind, or so she thought. Star earned a Bachelor of Science in education and a Master of Arts degree in painting from the University of Missouri, where she also played saxophone and performed as a striking drum major for Marching Mizzou. Later, she earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in printmaking from Indiana University, where her primary mentors were Rudy Pozzatti, Wendy Calman, and Marvin Lowe.

In 1985 she was hired as Instructor of Art by Southwestern University, where she retired in 2023 as a full professor. During these thirty-eight years, she made a significant impact on the Department of Art, the university at large, and the wider world of art. She also served as the gallery director for those 38 years, personally curating 45 exhibitions, twelve of which were in cooperation with the Brown Symposium. Star’s work was exhibited on four continents in ten different countries. She leaves behind a large body of work including drawings, prints, and paintings. Her drawings and paintings are largely classically inspired figurative work, while her prints are mostly abstract. Her monumental work, The Mysteries Revisited, is an installation comprised of eight large paintings set within an architectural framework, a freestanding form that is a feminist reinterpretation of the ancient Room of the Mysteries Pompeii created during the Postmodern revival of figurative art. The Mysteries Revisited measures 30 feet long x 17 feet wide x 11 feet high.

The artist stands outside the gallery for her exhibition The Mysteries Revisited

Star Varner at her The Mysteries Revisited exhibition

A woman waving a purple garment overhead rides a white bull in this oil painting executed with rich reds and faux fresco and stone textures to be reminiscent of murals at Pompeii

Feminist Reinterpretation of The Rape of Europa

From The Mysteries Revisited exhibition

In the past decade, Star conceived a new direction for her artwork based on the concept of forces that pull families and other groups together. She found that her lifelong skill in western trick roping was a useful medium for this idea, because the force that allows a rope to spin in a circle, centripetal force, works to bring a body closer to the center of the circular path on which it rotates. She saw this as a natural visual metaphor for the forces that pull people toward intellectual, social and political centers. Using this method, she made a large body of work, Centripetal Forces, by coating her rope with charcoal and spinning it over copper plates arranged in a circle, or over a large wooden circle. For the copper plates, she then engraved the charcoal marks with a burin and created etchings on a printing press. Additional works made by this technique included paintings on the large wooden circles, and drawings on paper. So, Star’s skills as a rodeo performer finally worked their way into her art work after all. She was fairly confident that no other artist would copy or imitate her work, because she knew of no other artist with such roping skills. Much of Star’s work may be seen at www.victoriastarvarner.com

Star also left indelible marks on the hearts and minds of a large number of students, friends and colleagues because of her kindness, intelligence, and high ethical standards. She was proud of the fact that her former students now have successful careers as practicing artists, university professors, art museum directors, gallerists, medical illustrators, and art conservationists.

Victoria Star Varner
Artist’s statement

For the engravings in the “Crossed Paths” series, I use American trick roping to create images intended as metaphors for national identity and how all cultures construct their own notions of authenticity and identity. The centripetal force of a spinning rope acts a natural metaphor for the forces that pull us toward our own intellectual and social centers, while the indexical marks left by the rope may be seen as cultural constructions of American identity and the traces we leave worldwide.

The process: I coat a rope with charcoal, spin it onto plates laid on the floor in a circle, then engraving the pattern of charcoal particles left by the spinning rope into the plates with a burin. The prints present two overlapped engravings per square, the top one floating as a spinning rope floats in the air. Ironically, the few seconds it takes to spin the original charcoal image onto plates develops into a long, painstaking process of creating the prints and cataloging them into a combinatoric system of the 6,400 combinations made possible from the original ten square plates.