Vicki Todd

Artist	Vicki Todd	Resides	United States
Website	vickiworldart.com	Medium	Clay
Follow the Artist	Instagram \| Facebook	Email	[email protected]
		Themes	Fantasy Nature Melancholy Emotion and Self-Reflection Divine Feminine Heroine’s Journey Floral Themes Humanimal Visual Storytelling Memoir Art

About the artist

Hailing from Happy, Texas (the Town Without a Frown), Vicki Todd is a largely self-taught artist. Her fascination with art began in her Grandmother’s china shop and painting classes taught in her home attic. Vicki’s Grandmother encouraged her to sit in during the classes and paint china pieces along with the adult students. Vicki has fond memories of that little china shop: her grandfather prying open the slatted wooden crates of imported china and feathery shreds of newspaper cushioning spilling onto the floor, the smell of turpentine in tiny pimento jars used to clean brushes. Due to this influence, Vicki announced at the age of 6 that she wanted to be an artist during the question-and-answer portion of the Little Miss Happy beauty contest, which she participated in and won – a memory she recalls through her mother’s telling of the story. However, art became a part-time hobby pushed to life’s back burner.

Vicki ended up living a double life. She earned a doctorate degree and taught public relations for 17 years at the university level. However, her dirty little secret was that really she was an artist at heart. Vicki gravitated toward painting female portraits surrounded by emotion and femininity to express the anxiety, fear, determination, and hope she felt. After the third portrait, she realized she was painting a visual memoir of what was happening in her life one snapshot at a time. During this tumultuous yet exciting period, Vicki tried to live two existences, creating her art at night and any free weekends she could sneak in. However, it just wasn’t enough time to explore her passion. So, she put her octogenarian mother into shock by resigning from her tenured professor position to follow her bliss of art.

In 2018, Vicki felt an undeniable urge to try her hand at sculpting clay and to discover how her storytelling themes could travel from the 2D canvas to 3D forms. She now resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico and is focusing on sculpting her female nude figures full time. Vicki is inspired by the emotion and flowing energy of the female face and figure, vivid contemporary color palettes, and floral motifs. She strives for her sculptures to emote the Heroine’s Journey of evolution, self-growth and metamorphosis. Vicki is also a playwright. In 2022 she performed a one-woman show she authored called Shine Happy Shine!, which incorporates her vivid body print artworks and expressive fairytale mask sculptures. She recently wrote a second play, Does This Make Me Delusional?, which she hopes will hit the stage in the near future.

Artwork Themes & Subject Matter

Vicki Todd is a memoir artist and sculptor.

She hand-builds expressive female figures from clay, each imbued with a story to tell.

Clay coils or slabs are the basis for Vicki’s sculptures. When forming a figure’s stance, she attempts to give each one her own voice and spirit through the body pose, hand and foot placement, a lifted finger or toe, and facial expression. The clay beings project determination, joy, peacefulness, or wistfulness. At times, Vicki says her sculptures have a mind of their own and tell her who they desire to be. Sometimes the sculptures’ characters and messages are not revealed until Vicki adds the last bit of paint, and she steps back to access from a distance.

Most of Vicki’s sculptures include a floral theme, symbolizing evolution, self-growth and transformation. These themes emerge as sculpted clay flower stalks arising from the crowns of heads or flowering vines twining around arms, legs or torsos. Or, Vicki free-hand paints flowering vines, female muse faces, or quotes onto the sculptures’ skin, similar to colorful tattoos.

Vicki’s sculptures are made from sturdy mid/high-fire clay bodies, ranging in color from smoother whites to grittier yellow wheat. Some pieces are fired only once, slowly taking the sculpture from raw clay to cone 4 in one kiln session. She decorates these sculptures with layer upon layer of colorful acrylic paints, which allows for more detailed painting techniques similar to painting on a canvas. For other pieces, Vicki uses two firing sessions and paints them with color-saturated underglazes, as well as translucent and satin overglazes, giving those figures a watercolor essence and a mix of glossy and slight sheen finishes.

In addition to Vicki’s clay sculptures, she paints expressive female portraits and figures on canvas. She’s interested in exploring how a common theme, such as flowering vines or the inclusion of quotes, expresses and mirrors itself through the 3D dimensions of clay, as well as on the 2D surface of a canvas.