Virginie Baude

‍ Artist of the North

In reverence of the Wild North

its land,

its silence,

its living Spirit,

and the world it awakens in my imagination.

“A wolf that meets your gaze.
A raven that carries mystery.
A bear that breathes quiet strength.

I paint the Northern Wild — not as isolated subjects, but as part of a larger world shaped by weather, distance, and survival.

My work comes from years spent living close to wilderness: studying wildlife, traveling remote landscapes, flying over mountain terrain, and experiencing the North from within rather than from a distance.

What begins as observation often awakens a painting in my imagination. Some paintings are born directly from the North itself - its weather, wildlife, silence, and light. Others grow from imagination, memory, symbolism, and design.

The foundation is traditional craft, but the language shifts with the painting: atmospheric when I want silence, symbolic when I want mystery, contemporary when I want impact, and invented when imagination wants to run.

The subject may change, but the pursuit remains the same: to create work that feels alive.

I draw everything myself and paint from life whenever I can, in the tradition of carl Rungius and Bruno Liljefors.

I am not interested in reproducing photographs alone. I want the work to feel inhabited — as though the animal, the atmosphere, and the land belong to the same living moment.

I paint the North as it lives in memory and imagination, the way it felt reading The Call of The wild at seven. When I draw on history, from old photographs of working dogs and the early North, it is inspiration, not documentation.

The North has become the focus of my work:
the wildlife,
the landscapes,
the dogs of the North,
the bush planes,
and the untamed spirit that connects them all.”