Victoria Star Varner

Victoria Star Varner died on February 25, 2024 in her home in Georgetown TX, surrounded by her loving family. After her diagnosis of a terminal brain cancer in 2022, she maintained a positive attitude and inspired others with her expressions of gratitude for the life she was allowed to live and the many wonderful people in her life.

Born in 1955, Star, as she preferred to be called, grew up in a family that produced rodeos and provided trail rides on horseback at Lake of the Ozarks, Missouri. She worked alongside her parents and siblings in this endeavor, joining her brother and sister in a trick-roping performance in the evenings and leading trail rides during the days. She became interested in art at an early age and decided to pursue university degrees in art, leaving the western world behind, or so she thought. Star earned a Bachelor of Science in education and a Master of Arts degree in painting from the University of Missouri, where she also played saxophone and performed as a striking drum major for Marching Mizzou. Later, she earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in printmaking from Indiana University, where her primary mentors were Rudy Pozzatti, Wendy Calman and Marvin Lowe.

In 1985 she was hired as Instructor of Art by Southwestern University, where she retired in 2023 as a full professor. During these thirty-eight years, she made a significant impact on the Department of Art, the university at large and the wider world of art. She also served as the gallery director for those 38 years, personally curating 45 exhibitions, twelve of which were in cooperation with the Brown Symposium. Star’s work was exhibited on four continents in ten different countries. She leaves behind a large body of work including drawings, prints and paintings. Her drawings and paintings are largely classically inspired figurative work, while her prints are mostly abstract. Her monumental work, The Mysteries Revisited, is an installation comprised of eight large paintings set within an architectural framework, a freestanding form that is a feminist reinterpretation of the ancient Room of the Mysteries Pompeii created during the Postmodern revival of figurative art. The Mysteries Revisited measures 30 feet long x 17 feet wide x 11 feet high.

In the past decade, Star conceived a new direction for her artwork based on the concept of forces that pull families and other groups together. She found that her lifelong skill in western trick roping was a useful medium for this idea, because the force that allows a rope to spin in a circle, centripetal force, works to bring a body closer to the center of the circular path on which it rotates. She saw this as a natural visual metaphor for the forces that pull people toward intellectual, social and political centers. Using this method, she made a large body of work, Centripetal Forces, by coating her rope with charcoal and spinning it over copper plates arranged in a circle, or over a large wooden circle. For the copper plates, she then engraved the charcoal marks with a burin and created etchings on a printing press.

Additional works made by this technique included paintings on the large wooden circles, and drawings on paper. So, Star’s skills as a rodeo performer finally worked their way into her art work after all. She was fairly confident that no other artist would copy or imitate her work, because she knew of no other artist with such roping skills. Much of Star’s work may be seen at www.victoriastarvarner.com

Star also left indelible marks on the hearts and minds of a large number of students, friends and colleagues because of her kindness, intelligence and high ethical standards. She was proud of the fact that her former students now have successful careers as practicing artists, university professors, art museum directors, gallerists, medical illustrators and art conservationists.

Star was preceded in death by her parents, Hope and Victor “Tex” Varner.

Survivors include her husband, Kenny Sheppard; her siblings, Gay Chargualaf (Jesse) of Austin, and her brother Dickson Varner (Tricia) of College Station; and stepson, Andy Sheppard (Becky Sheppard), their daughters Meghan Bannister (Patrick), Lauren Wright (Casey), and Sarah Sheppard. Kenny’s sister, Peggy Smith, and his brother, Tommy Sheppard, are among her dear family members. Star cherished her niece and nephews Nicole Chargualaf (Tom McCarty), Victor Varner (Monica), Zack Varner (Jessica), Jay Chargualaf, and their families along with the many descendants of her sister, Patricia McNutt of Indianapolis, who predeceased her.