Virginia Shepley is an artist working in Tobaccoville, North Carolina. She received a Master of Fine Arts in Painting in 2001 from John F. Kennedy University’s Arts and Consciousness Program in Berkeley, California. In 2005, after 25 years in the Bay Area, she relocated to the South to be near family.

She creates art to describe experiences for which there are no words. Her aim is to document the often fleeting feeling of connection with all that is. A convergence of flesh and the sublime that becomes a physical and visual experience. She is interested in the visual exploration of the “thin” place or Axis Mundi where Heaven and Earth, God and Man, and inner and outer worlds meet. The relationship between two or more forms is a common theme – the energy between them and the longing that keeps them striving to come closer. The erotic quality of the shapes and the colors of flesh reflect the vulnerability and are the embodiment of the experience. 

Her work has been shown on the West Coast and in North Carolina.

My hope is that the viewer will recognize something of their own experience of connectedness or the search for it when looking at my work. 

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The artist has also participated in the following online exhibitions:

Visions.