“I have been experimenting with color a little bit more,” she said. “Something that stands out, like the way the sky is framed and there is blue in there, or a tree is coming into the built environment and there is some green there.”
Trimble’s art is about how she sees the world.
“I think a lot of my art is stopping and really looking at something that we pass by everyday,” she said. “Or really looking at the relationships between things a lot more deliberately.”
Trimble’s art is drawn from her own experiences and travels. (Contributed drawing)
This has brought her to capture some of the yin and yang of human constructs versus nature.
“For a while it really was about ‘How does the built environment bring meaning to us?’” she said. “It is different for everybody. What is the interaction between human-built environment and the natural environment? What does it mean when the humans are gone? Nature takes back over eventually, ruins where nature is taking over. Some of my art lately has been nature combined with a built environment, focused on commentary about our changing climate.”
Trimble’s studio is on the second floor of the Charlottesville home she shares with her husband and two children. One-third of the room is her office she uses when she works remotely for UVA Sustainability. The rest is her studio. A drafting table created from a door, cans full of pens and brushes, trays of watercolor paints, sketch pads and note cards filled with thin-lined pen-and-ink drawings attest to her life as an artist. On one side of the room is a four-drawer art cabinet, its top covered with her children’s Harry Potter Lego structures. Trimble’s drawings and watercolors surround her in this world.
Trimble aspired early to be an artist, working with painting, batik and sculpture in high school and later settling on the thin black lines during architecture school, a career that she practiced in Boston.
Trimble translates what she sees into detailed line drawings. (Contributed drawing)
“You are using the right side of your brain, being creative, but there is also a very practical left-brained aspect to architecture where you are measuring dimensions that need to fit or drawing in perspective,” she said. “Collaboration is also integral, an aspect that I value in my role in UVA Sustainability. You are a member of a team, working for someone who is asking you to design something.”
Architecture is an important part of Trimble’s work because it is all around and always changing, giving meaning and memories through houses, workplaces and public buildings.
“A lot of the art I have been doing tries to capture that sense of place, even if it is temporarily through travel,” she said.
While she has been an artist most of her life, Trimble decided to go public with her work only a few years ago.
“I think it was the pandemic, really,” she said. “That feeling of ‘Life is short and going by really fast and what am I waiting for? Am I waiting until I am established?’
