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Using nature as inspiration and medium.
Peggy Turner Zablotny lives in a world as visually rich and layered as her artwork. She surrounds herself with color: vibrant, juicy, intense. The home she shares with her husband, Steve, also an artist/designer, and Zeeky Boy, the cutest wire fox terrier puppy ever, feels like a carefully curated collection of anything and everything that catches her or Steve’s eye. Imagine a world where everything is beautiful, every dish, every chair, every tiny figurine, every vase filled with the flowers that are the soul and images of Peggy’s collages. Even Zeeky’s dog bowls are artfully placed.
If you already know of Peggy’s collages, you have a picture in your mind of flowers that may be left whole and/or taken apart, petal by petal, to rearrange into a work of art. She grows many of them in shaped garden beds filled with an exuberant collection of dahlias, cosmos, black-eyed Susans, heliopsis, verbena bonariensis, nicotiana Langsdorfii, petunias, marigolds. Her rich palette of colors includes purple, orange, yellow-gold, chartreuse, magenta, blue, crimson, purple-that-looks-black, the range of whites from ice to cream. Leaves, grasses, curling or linear vines, pieces of bark also are included in the artist’s collection of possibilities.
Peggy tends her garden, watching for the moment when her flowers are at their best. She cuts them and brings them into her studio to prepare for pressing. She may press a whole flower, a leaf, a petal, or dissect a flower into small thinner pieces that are carefully spaced on layers of newsprint, blotter paper, and the masonite dividers of her press. She slowly applies pressure with the wing nuts to press the layers together, tightening them slightly every day to ensure a good pressing. “That step is tricky,” she says. “A perfectly dried flower or bud or petal may result, but sometimes they don’t come out of the press as I expect. They may be too old or too wet or stick to the pressing paper. Sometimes they just don’t work.”
But mostly they do. When material comes out of her press, she lays the pressed materials between layers of newsprint to keep them organized, labeling them by whatever she was working on: date, color, idea, type of flower, then stores them in clear bags that go into bigger storage boxes for reference or later use. “I may not use something I press for years,” Peggy says. “I always have an idea of how I want to use it someday. It might be a color, a flower, a day, an event. I composed a collage for 9/11. I have done them for pets, people, places, thoughts, events, or just because.” On her website (peggyturnerzablotny.com) are a series of pieces that follow the months or the days of the months. They are a perfect visual diary.
Making art relies on the artist’s vision. Peggy always has something in mind before she chooses which flowers to press. She uses her flowers and grasses to produce something that transcends those materials, much the way a painter uses tubes of paint and brushes of varying sizes and thicknesses to produce something that transcends those humble materials.
My thought was to use the flowers as my medium, my pigment. From a distance or very small, one might see the colors but maybe not the flowers until one got close or the image got bigger.
– Peggy Turner Zablotny
She begins by composing her “actuals,” as she calls her original collage constructions, on acid-free matboard. They are small, only a few inches in dimension, protected by glass laid over the top. She lays a paper cut-out, or mask, over the glass to serve as a frame and a place for notes, titles, dates, crop marks, etc. When completed, they will be photographed, enlarged, and printed in the rich, intensely colored, detailed presentation for which Peggy is well-known. The completed prints are usually only one size, embodying the original vision with which she began. She does have some that are two or three sizes, but not many.
Peggy told me that her art-making process is purely intuitive. She just begins. But even without preliminary sketches, either loose thumbnails or carefully rendered finished drawings, a work of art doesn’t appear fully realized. It can take a long time or a short time, as long as is needed. It is the setting down, observing, leaving what has been placed, or making changes that may be minute or substantial. That is the fun of it, the magic that fills an artist’s day without time seeming to pass at all.
Her one exception was for “Composition For a Celebration, 2010,” for the fortieth anniversary program of the Martha’s Vineyard Chamber Music Society. It was inspired by “Quartet #1 in C Minor, op.15” by Gabriel Faure, “the only piece I ever did a preliminary drawing for.” Seeing the drawings and artist’s notes is fascinating. It allows us a peek at the pictures in her mind, an unexpected glimpse of what is usually hidden.
Peggy created the TwentyFive Series in 2019 to honor the 25 years she had been making her flower collages. She had amassed quite a collection of pressed, but unused, flowers she decided to organize by color. The colors had softened over time, appearing closer in shades of color and value. Peggy said, “My thought was to use the flowers as my medium, my pigment. From a distance or very small, one might see the colors but maybe not the flowers until one got close or the image got bigger.”
The actuals for this series are as large as the finished prints, 22 by 22 inches, with no enlargement or reduction. Peggy used multiple layers of plant material built to thicknesses of ⅛ to ¼ inch. Though most of her collages have multiple layers, none are as thickly composed as those of the TwentyFive Series. The result is a more abstract surface, more of an overall pattern that deconstructs the reality of the individual flowers. I found the whole concept intriguing.
There are four completed compositions. They are all complex, each surface completely covered. All together, they gave me a sense of the seasons, but one needn’t make that analogy. Art is made by the artist, then it’s left to the viewer to see what they will see. Be sure, though, to accept the invitation to carefully and closely examine each surface after taking in the overall images from afar.
In the TwentyFive Series, Composition 1 glows from within with energy and light, seemingly contained only by the edges of its matrix. It is composed of softened colors that move across its surface: cream/green to yellow/red to purple/lavender blue. When I walked up close to it, I could see the individual flowers, florets, and petals. They seem to be summer flowers and the feeling of summer warmth is how the piece felt to me.
Composition 2 made me think of winter, of a quiet walk through woods of desiccated leaves, fern fronds, seed pods, and grasses curling across a path. Blotches of white birch bark from the tree in Peggy’s yard could be patches of snow, although there is really no reason I have to make it into anything real or realistic; it is what it is, a composed surface of lights and darks, of different sizes and shapes, softened edges and sharp ones, close values and stronger contrasts.
Composition 3 has the most active surface. It is tightly constructed like Composition 1, with an allover pattern that reminded me of another sort of woodland walk, of fallen leaves and faded autumnal hues. Peggy has played the complementary greens, gray-greens, and still-vibrant yellows of her background against a complexity of red cuphea flowers, their stems attached, that make a strong directional movement like pointing arrows across the whole surface.
Composition 4 is composed mostly of spring flowers and spring colors. Black or cream-colored violas, heads of hydrangea and verbena separated into single florets, ruby-colored cosmos, leaves that are newly -green or faded from the season before. Several dark red orchids appear, their five distinct petals like dancing, high-kicking Rockettes amidst the rounder, softer shapes. Colors are arranged in a dark-to-light diagonal sweep.
Throughout my visit, Peggy shared with me her enthusiasm for her beautiful garden, and her careful drying and collecting of the seeds she will plant again when the weather warms next spring. She showed me her studio, her collection of art books, the flower presses she built herself to accommodate her requirements, her boxes of pressed flora, several of the actuals that precede the photographing and printing process of her final work, and those finished pieces, framed and artfully arranged on the walls of her house. It was an afternoon I will not forget. Nor will I forget my deeper understanding and appreciation for the work that Peggy does.
She told me: “For me, it’s about searching, looking and seeing these discoveries and understanding how amazing the world is right in front of us each and every day.”
