Victoria Lowe was born in Birmingham, AL and spent most of her adult years in Washington, DC. She was focused on art from an early age, and found ways to work on independent projects through her elementary and high school years. She entered the University of Alabama at seventeen and received her BS in education in 1969 and MS in art in1971. In undergraduate and graduate school, Lowe felt like she found a new family in the art department.

Two professors became mentors – Melville Price, who played an important role in the Abstract Expressionist movement in New York, and Howard Goodson, who was instrumental in the movement’s Southern regional influence. Both revered Hans Hoffman as an artist and a teacher, patterning their classes after his method of eliciting creative expression from the students. Lowe was encouraged to find her own path as an artist, and this became a model for her own teaching at Florida Southern College and Florida Polytechnic University.

In the art department, Lowe and her fellow students were exposed to new developments in art, including the main camps of Abstract Expressionism, Action Painting and Color Field painting. She cites artists who inspired deep emotional responses during her early years – Turner, Monet, Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhart, Rothko, and Olitski. James Turrell’s work is particularly interesting to Lowe, for his sensitive use of light and space. Another important influence has been travel and the art and archeology of Mexico, Egypt, and Europe. Lowe has described her experience as a child gazing through a telescope at the stars in the night sky – the sense of mystery, beauty, and connectedness she felt continues to inspire her art. She cites her experience meditating, initiated in childhood, as giving her access to the inner space evoked in her paintings.

In graduate school at the University of Alabama, Lowe focused on painting, receiving her degree in Studio Art, including painting, drawing and sculpture. Spray painting emerged as her primary technique while still in school and after her move to Washington, DC, where she lived from the 1970s until 2006 when she moved to Lakeland, FL. In Washington she was a member of a performance art group lead by international artist, Marta Minujiin, that appeared at the Museum of Modern Art, New York Avant-Garde Festival, and galleries in New York and Wash, DC.

During the 1970s, Lowe produced the spray painting series, Ener-Area and Ener-Space, which focus on shifting, atmospheric fields inflected by colored coronas. The Ener-Section Series of the 1980s features abstract gateways to pictorial space. Early in 1990s the spray enamel technique presents health issues which triggers minimising spray by working smaller and on paper. By the 2000s, the artist focuses on painted collages and drawings composed of lines and gestural elements in pastel and graphite. In the Mind-Space Categories, she switches from spray enamel to spray acrylic and introduces lines and spheres moving across the surface. Sequences of smaller canvases or drawings together form a single work, extending Lowe’s explorations of energy and the emotive experience of color that she has pursued over the past four decades. By 2019, works begin incorporating actual light emanating from within and behind which further explores ethereal themes.