Peggy Bates

"Rabun I"	"Rabun II"
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"The source for Peggy Bates's paintings lies within a interest to embrace nature by exploring the mysterious connotations of water, rocks, topography, and other organic matter through personal experience and the input of pop culture¹s representation of reality. Perception is exaggerated in a organic play of paint which flows in a sensual manner where bio-morphic shapes and forms are pulled and stretched, expanding on the methodology of both surrealism and pop art. Process is crucial to her work and affects the choice of materials; plastic (acrylic enamel) is chosen to imitate the "real" and exaggerate the phenomena of natural substances. Peggy Bates creates paintings employing a technique where fluid paints are manipulated by pouring and pooling onto the surface of the canvas [which is] flat on the studio floor. This method creates radiating compositions of crisply swirling ripples and bubbly shapes, which spill, spiral, articulating imagery which appears as organic matter. The fanciful and evocative shades of hues remind us of color's inherent relativity, revealing a sense of the power of fantasy."

"Keowee I"	"Tullulah"
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Peggy Bates lives and works in New York City. She received her Master of Fine Arts from Hunter College, New York, in 1991. She has exhibited her work in the United States, Europe, Canada. Her most recent solo exhibition was at the Scope/NYC Fair in in March 2003. Her solo exhibition at the John Gibson Gallery in New York City in 1999 received much attention, with reviews published in the New York Times, Art in America, and CitySearch.com.

Peggy Bates was featured in articles published in Zingmagazine and Buixenpost (Netherlands), and in Cover Magazine. She has has received numerous awards including grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and The Netherland-America Foundation. Additionally, she has been the recipient of residency fellowships at Fundacion Valparadiso (Spain), Stichting Kunst en Complex (Rotterdam), and several in the United States including: Yaddo, MacDowell, Millay, Hambidge, Atlantic Center for the Arts and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her work is in numerous corporate and private collections in the United States, Holland, Germany, France, Spain, Canada, Japan and Thailand.

She can be reached at peggybates@earthlink.net.

Images © Peggy Bates