In a city known for its blindingly bright light and sharp, tropical contours, Victoria Hohlt is interested in the blur.
On the evening of December 5th, the Sarasota-based artist’s latest work, Blue Vase, debuted at the Art Ovation Hotel. Amid the polished hum of the city’s cultural set, the painting stood out not for its precision, but for its haze—a meditation on the fragility of the mind.
Blue Vase is not a static image; it is a timeline. In her written reflection accompanying the piece, Hohlt describes a creative process that bowed to the passage of time.
“Blue Vase began as a simple still life—a vase arranged on a table to be studied and painted,” Hohlt writes.
But art, like life, refuses to sit still. Over the days she worked on the piece in her studio, the flowers in the vase began to wilt. They shifted. They died. Bound by the constraints of time, Hohlt stopped painting what she saw in front of her and began painting what she remembered.
“The image became softer, blurred, and filled with the feeling of what once was,” she writes.
This pivot from observation to memory is the hallmark of Hohlt’s work, a practice deeply informed by her background. A Texas native, she didn’t just study brushstrokes at the University of Texas; she studied visual anthropology and global studies. She looks at a canvas the way an archaeologist looks at a dig site—as a record of human perception. Her research-driven approach draws a direct line from the motifs of ancient cave paintings to the fractured reality of modern abstract expressionism.
For Hohlt, Blue Vase became a critical-thinking piece about how we construct our own realities.
“I think that’s how we experience life, too: we hold onto memory, but only in fragments,” she writes. “The blur becomes the truth we carry. The beauty remains, even if the details fade.”
The painting stands as a testament to that philosophy—a blend of fine art and contemporary abstraction that challenges the viewer to question what they are actually seeing. Is it a vase? Or is it the memory of a vase, filtered through the haze of yesterday?
For Sarasota’s art community, the unveiling at Art Ovation was just the beginning. Hohlt’s work is currently on display at her studio at Creative Liberties, a growing hub for local talent. As interest in her anthropologically informed practice grows, Blue Vase serves as a quiet reminder that artists do more than record the present moment; they shape how we remember it.
Blue Vase is currently available for purchase at www.victoriahohlt.com.
