Face to Face is a portrait series which sprung from both an artist's need to continue to push herself and a very human need to fill the dark winter months with creative light. As an artist I feel I am still figuring out the ebbs and flows of my creativity, but one of the major revelations I have recently come to terms with is my need to be personally productive during the winter months. I have begun to purposefully leave space for myself to explore artwork and my creativity on those long dark evenings, finding light internally when it is externally limited. It was in this newly found personal growth period last Nov (2021) that I found myself experimenting with my style. I wanted to break out of my box, and find a new and exciting way to draw. During a random Pinterest scroll I found an image that spoke to me with lots of smeary reds and a smokey heat that captured the essence of those idolized summer days I was missing at the time in mid November; my muse to try and care less about photorealism and more about emotion and an exploration of color and tone. Within the span of two and a half months and an ever expanding Pinterest board I had created 30 of these evening exploration pieces and slowly came to the realization that this was my very first full blown series as an artist.

I grew up drawing, it was something that I came to naturally and found myself to be curious enough to keep at it. I would draw to pass the time, But it wasn’t something I was fixated on in any way that would produce a body of work. Through school I had accumulated plenty of disjointed one off pieces, none of which sat well together. I wasn’t even sure how other artists could stand to create a series. “How boring,” younger me would think, “Just creating the same thing over and over.” She was half right. It is creating similar things but it was anything but boring. After I finished that first image “Cigarette,” I was hooked, I wanted to play with digital paint like that a hundred more times. I wanted to get better at capturing the feelings that each image left in me, I needed to play with color combinations that made my brain light up.

Please enjoy my first ever solo show and I can only hope it finds a way to light you up during these dark and creative months.

—Julie Pegan

Face to Face: A Portrait Series, was made possible by the Idaho Commission on the Arts, the Alexa Rose Foundation and a generous donation by Cindy Kyle.