By Deb Mallory
Peg spent her career in education – she taught at the elementary school level for 27 years in both New York state and Colorado. After her retirement in 1999, Peg felt the creative urge and started taking classes in 2-D art at the Art Center in Grand Junction. Fate stepped in when she took a class in pastels with Sara Oakley and she fell in love with the medium. She ended up joining the Pastel Society of Colorado about 20 years ago, and since that initial exposure to pastels in the class with Ms. Oakley, she has participated in pastel workshops with Barbara Churchley, Cliff Austin, Lorenzo Chavez, and Richard McDaniel.
Peg gets her inspiration from all the beautiful places in Colorado and upstate New York that she has visited, lived in, and loved. Her family has kept a farm in upstate New York, which is one of her favorite places to visit, and to paint. She finds that any outdoor scenery is a joy to paint, but especially if there are trees involved. Her love of trees is obvious to those of us who are fans of Peg’s art – she has a way of capturing the character of the tree that makes you see that tree as an individual, not just part of the forest.
When she is not traveling and is at home here in Grand Junction, Peg enjoys painting with the local plein air group. She does a fair amount of photography when exploring the outdoors, so that she can take the references back to her studio to paint. Peg is also a very talented ceramics artist, and admits that having her hands in clay is an addiction! She has taken many classes from the Art Center’s resident ceramics expert, Terry Shepard, and confesses that throwing pots on the potter’s wheel or hand building ceramic artworks sends her to a very happy place!
In her spare time, Peg has taught pastel classes to beginners at her studio in downtown Grand Junction. The studio is at the Uptown Art Colony in Grand Junction, of which Peg is a member along with eleven other two-dimensional artists (all mediums, not just pastel). Additionally, Peg is represented by the Craig Gallery in Palisade, Colorado.
And finally in her own words: What Peg enjoys most about painting is “losing myself in the painting process – working through that ugly stage and watching the painting transform”.
The photos show one of Peg’s ceramics which is a raku piece, and her lovely pastel painting titled “Morning Walk”
