Victor Huggins

Leonard Victor Huggins Jr. produced both paintings and lithographs, of abstract compositions in his early years followed by sublime landscapes toward the latter part of his career. He went by the name Victor (sometimes Vic) Huggins.

Huggins was born in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and served in the United States military before going to college at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (UNC), where he earned both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees. He spent one year pursuing a PhD at Columbia University in New York. Before he was thirty-four, he had taught at: his alma mater UNC; Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee; North Carolina State University in Raleigh, and the University of South Carolina’s summer program at Hilton Head. His final appointment—which lasted a quarter of a century, from 1969 to 1994—was with the art department at Virginia Tech University (technically the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University) in Blacksburg. For a few summers Huggins led art students abroad to London and Brighton in England, and to select places across the continent. He also spent a year as Artist-in-Residence at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

The Virginia Tech campus is nestled against the Blue Ridge Mountains south of the Shenandoah Valley; the area provided much inspiration for Huggins’s landscapes. He admitted “You can't paint the dynamic quality the mountains have, even though they are extremely stable and stationary. The light will flood across the mountains and various contours suddenly will emerge because the angle of the light all of a sudden exposes one area and puts another into shadows. If you stare at them, it looks like they’re breathing.” Huggins applied the same kind of light and flat color to coastal scenery which he encountered while living in Newport, North Carolina, and Clearwater, Florida, after his retirement. His final residence was in Bogalusa, Louisiana, along the Mississippi River north of New Orleans. There he developed a passion for golf after giving up tennis.