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Pegi Nicol MacLeod: a life in art Curated by Laura Brandon Carleton University Art Gallery, Ottawa February 7 – April 17, 2005
Pegi Nicol MacLeod was among Canada's most prominent artists during the second quarter of the twentieth century. In her short lifetime she showed her paintings extensively across the country, alongside the likes of A.Y. Jackson and the rest of the Group of Seven. She won prestigious national art prizes and received important commissions, including one for war art from the National Gallery of Canada. She was a founder of, and a respected teacher at, a summer art school at the University of New Brunswick. Although these credentials are enough to warrant the current restoration of her work to the public arena, her achievements are even more exceptional because she gained respect as an artist in an almost exclusively male milieu. As one discovers when visiting Pegi Nicol MacLeod: A Life in Art, the potential for gender-based barriers to her acceptance in the art world was of no consequence to this free-spirited and determined young woman (called “Pegi” by all who knew and admired her), just as familial objections and constant financial struggles could not stop her from pursuing her vocation. Pegi was committed to being an artist above all else. That she was able to achieve her goal attests to her talent, her single-minded commitment, and the beguiling force of her personality, through which she easily gained friends and supporters.
All of these qualities radiate from the works that make up the first comprehensive, national exhibition of Pegi's work since her untimely death from cancer at the age of 45. Curated by Laura Brandon and scheduled for a Canada-wide tour, Pegi Nicol MacLeod: A Life in Art collectively explodes off the walls of the Carleton University Art Gallery. These 55 oil and watercolour paintings (selected from among hundreds in existence) swirl with colour and movement and are infused with energy and immediacy in both subject matter and approach. Pegi painted what she saw and felt in the landscapes and cityscapes, the people and objects around her. Her muses were found in whatever environment she happened to be in. Housebound with a new baby in a New York City tenement in the late 1930s, she painted her child and the changing scenes outside her window.
Wherever she was, Pegi painted constantly and almost compulsively: for her, art was equivalent to life. Whatever their subject matter, her paintings observe the immediate sensory pleasure and, occasionally, the pain of day-to-day living. Symbol-infused, highly personal self-portraits, and paintings of the activities of female WW II reservists and tenement apartment neighbours pulsate with a vitality that extends beyond the edges of the works, almost suggesting that Pegi herself continues to be present in them. It is this sentient quality that is the most enduring achievement of her art.
Pegi died in 1949 in New York City, far from the outer reaches of the Canadian art establishment. For over half a century, her art remained almost completely hidden from the public eye but continued to be highly regarded in many private collections. Curator Laura Brandon's tireless commitment to returning Pegi's work into the view of the public reflects the same strength of character that Pegi herself possessed. Brandon's efforts have made it possible for Pegi Nicol MacLeod's long-obscured presence to be keenly felt by every visitor to the show.
Footnotes
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The exhibition will travel to The Winnipeg Art Gallery, the Robert McLaughlin Gallery (Oshawa) and The Beaverbrook Art Gallery (Fredericton). Laura Brandon's biography, Pegi by Herself: The Life of Pegi Nicol MacLeod (McGill–Queen's University Press, 2005), and a National Film Board documentary directed by Michael Ostroff, Pegi Nicol, Something Dancing About Her, have also been released in conjunction with the exhibition.