Virginia Vaughan

The Calm before Hurricane Harvey Impressionism Rockport Texas Gulf Coast Sea

2019

I paint because it’s the best way I know to communicate, study, and observe creative work that’s how Texas painter V…. Vaughan (the first initial stands for Virginia) describes her drive to create fine art. “It’s a calling,” she says of her life’s work, which has taken several twists and turns but has, nevertheless, led her down the path toward fulfillment. A lifelong Texan, Vaughan grew up in the Austin area and today makes her home in Round Rock, a suburb of the capital city. As a child, she exhibited a love of making art and played the role of the creative one among the seven children in her family, eventually working for several of her siblings as a sign painter and designer. Her parents forever encouraged her to appreciate and mine her passion, instilling in her that it was not simply a passing fancy, but an innate gift. “It was always conveyed to me that this was a God-given talent,” she says. Somehow that made me feel like it was something I was supposed to do. It gave me permission to pursue it. Vaughan attended college on an athletic scholarship, though she filled her schedule with art classes and subsequently secured an internship at an advertising agency. That introduction to the corporate world set her off in a new direction—she left school to parlay the summer job into a full-time position. She continued to work as a commercial artist for many years after that, winning several prestigious ADDY Awards and working on high-profile accounts for Samsung, the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, and Harcourt Publishing, among others.