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"Hope and History," a gallery exhibit showcasing hopes and dreams intermixed with history and healing by allegorical, realist painter Judith Peck of Virginia, near Washington D.C., is on display in The Gallery at the Pennsylvania College of Technology through April 18.
As a realistic painter, Peck creates paintings that viewers are can identify what is in the painting, relating to the message and concept.
Peck gave a gallery talk on March 15 in The Gallery. She had pieces like the "Arrow Paradox," "Profiling" and the "Ripple Effect" on display. These pieces are part of her series called "Current Times" -- the model seen throughout this body of work is multicultural and depicts what is happening in the world right now. Some other paintings are also from her body of work titled "Identity" and older series.
"I'm hoping that people who look at it, the viewer, would come away with compassion for each other," she said.
Peck was inspired by her orphaned grandparents when they left Russia for the United States. Peck's grandparents were both killed, she said, and even though they left their shattered lives in Russia, they carried this part of themselves, experiences, with them. Peck refers to this part of their lives as shards. She originally started painting about family stories, but now paints about current times, she said.
Peck paints with oil and uses shards of plaster fragments that can be seen on board. The paintings on display in The Gallery show how Peck depicts a broken world through her use of plaster shards and fragments, held together by people, the human spirit and hope, which she has painted with oils.
"In spite of the hard and cracked world that my images are on, sometimes you can't even see the cracks because the image is so strong. So when you're looking at it, I think that the cracks sometimes disappear," said Peck. "I think it shows hope even though we have that crack, we bring the shards together. That being said, we sometimes can't hide those cracks, which is why I've erased some of the plaster in some of the paintings."
Because of hope, "even when the cruelest things happen to humanity, we seem to survive and rise above it," she said.
She is inspired by poetry, like Seamus Heaney's, an Irish poet, "The Cure at Troy, A Version of Sophocles' Philoctetes," literature, people and their stories and experiences and life in the world today, she said. A quote from a poem in Heaney's book, "The Cure at Troy, A Version of Sophocles' Philoctetes," about hope has particularly inspired Peck's body of work and exhibition title. It reads:
"History says, Don't hope / On this side of the grave. / But then, once in a lifetime / The longed-for tidal wave / Of justice can rise up, / And hope and history rhyme. / So hope for a great sea-change / On the far side of revenge."
Peck has been painting her whole life, she said, "I was born with a brush, I don't see any time when I wasn't really working."
She attended George Washington University, D.C., and started her career as an antique furniture restorationist. She then moved on to become a trompe-l'oeil artist and taught at the Smithsonian, she said.
A trompe-l'oeil artist "deceives the eye with paint. So I paint marble or surface to look like marble and cloud ceilings -- fool the eye," Peck said.
Peck's paintings have been exhibited throughout the States, earning juror's awards, has participated in art fairs and has had solo exhibitions. She's also been featured in publications, like "Poets/Artists," and in Ori Z. Soltes, author, books, like "Tradition and Transformations." Her artwork, also, is in both public and private collections.
"I'm not painting the other, I'm painting everyone and we all live in the world together and we are responsible for everyone, each other," she said.