Peggy Prugh
I’m a traveler and an artist. I always bring things home from my journeys—anything that is unusual or beautiful or says something about where I’ve been. My travels inspire me, and in my studio, I try to get that feeling onto canvas.
Each of the mediums I work with—encaustics, oils, pastels—is valuable to me. If I get stuck when I’m working with oils, say, I can switch to encaustic. Anything goes with encaustic—colors, intensities, collage, drawing, adding layers or subtracting—and often I can work myself out of the box I seem to be stuck in.
My favorite subject is the female figure, where I can kind of lose the edges and get more into the colors, textures and shapes. Faces and hands often dominate my work, directing the eye to other shapes like Klimt-inspired patterns on the clothing.
Through art I find that I’m a keener observer of my world. I’m always entranced to learn what it is that others see in an object. Design, colors, patterns in nature—art has given me another way of seeing the world. In Jackson, out of this enormous landscape, it can be one gorgeous tree limb in a certain light that grabs my attention.
I try to stay organized and inspired. Little things that remind me of my travels line my desk along with some color studies. The large painting is really an abstract composite of images from my trip to Inch Beach on the Dingle Peninsula of Ireland. Those black-faced sheep followed me everywhere.
There’s a strength in pastels. They have the vibrancy of oils, but there’s an immediacy for me as an artist. I can go directly to the color I need without having to mix anything, a process in itself.
This is called a French Mistress palette; it folds up and preserves the oil paints for a longer time in our dry climate. The piece on the easel is called “The Conversation,” the first in a series of inanimate pears doing something very human.
