Two-dimensional mixed media artist Christine Peloquin was just a child when she declared that she was going to be an artist, an ambition she has successfully realized.
“Art is my therapy. If I didn’t have art, yoga practice and my family, I would not be the person that I am,” says Peloquin, who will join mosaic artist Anita Prentice as a guest artist throughout November at Gallery 14 in downtown Vero Beach.
Peloquin’s exhibition, Facing Truth, and Prentice’s Visions of a Song exhibit will open with a reception from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. on Friday Nov. 5 during the First Friday Gallery Stroll.
“I was drawing at 3 years old,” recalls Peloquin. Throughout her childhood in Rhode Island, and later in high school after her family relocated to Orlando, she enrolled in every art class possible to further her desire. After graduation, she headed off to Rollins College in Winter Park, Fla., where she majored in art with a minor in business.
Peloquin worked for several theme parks as a scenic artist in Orlando, before starting her own company, initially traveling around the U.S. painting commercial murals and faux finishing.
Over the past 30 years, her artwork has garnered national attention, and can now be seen in private collections and art galleries across the country. She currently lives in Sorrento, Fla., with fiancée Heather and sons Nate and Nick.
Peloquin says she was greatly influenced by her mother, grandmother and aunts, who exposed her at an early age to the fiber arts and encouraged the pursuit of her talents. She quickly learned that she was only limited by her own imagination and would later branch out to cultivate a palate of assorted forms of media.
“My mom said I drew a floorplan of our house when I was 4. I was designing dresses as a kid, and my cousin told me I was the only sixth-grader she ever knew who was designing wallpaper,” Peloquin recalls.
Today, while she continues to dabble in watercolors and oils, Peloquin’s preferred medium is drawing and painting on fabric and paper collage.
“I grew up sewing, but I’d much rather glue things down. I love color and pattern and design,” says Peloquin, who first sketches with charcoal, which she says can be easily altered if she makes a mistake.
Although her subjects are typically the faces and figures of women and children, she also enjoys working on landscapes and abstracts.
“I love drawing, love painting, love collage. I came up with this style over the last couple of decades, incorporating all those things that I love into one piece, because I wanted a little bit of everything in there,” says Peloquin.
Her process, she explains, has evolved over the years through experimentation, and she has since created a stockpile of collages.
“That way, I have an inventory of different panels so that when I do get an image in my head or my heart, then I pick the panel that works with it the best.”
To create a collage, she arranges fabric and paper in patterns akin to a quilt, before adhering the pieces to wood panels. Peloquin uses a myriad of materials for the collage – what she calls the understory of the final piece.
Materials have included antique textiles, contemporary fabrics, tablecloths, vintage dictionary pages and sheets from old children’s schoolbooks, atlases, architectural plans and wallpaper.
You might also spot napkins, lace, buttons, flowers and leaves, along with myriad other papers and 2D found objects.
When inspired to do so, she can also print and design her own fabric and paper, the choices all driven by what she feels at the time.
“I’m constantly buying and making papers and fabrics. I just let them speak to me. Then I just start cutting and ripping and shredding and placing things, letting them organically grow from there.”
After applying a translucent matte or polymer medium atop the collage, it needs to cure for about 24 hours. Once dry, Peloquin draws her figures using charcoal, before employing acrylics and other media to fill in the details. A final acrylic glaze ensures that the paint will adhere to the canvas without overwhelming the collage underneath.
Although her collages and paintings could easily stand on their own, she says she sees her collages as the collective story and personality of the images she superimposes on her canvases.
“The collage coming through a face is symbolic of all the layers of personality and experience and thought. My faces and figures are not about portraiture in the sense of capturing a likeness, but about capturing an essence,” Peloquin explains.
“I do some portraiture, but they’re not really specific people. They are autobiographical, because instead of capturing a likeness, I’m trying to capture emotion and a feeling with the piece; to capture a moment in time with an expression.”
Two years ago, Peloquin branched out into publishing with her first children’s book, “If You Could Tell Time, What Would You Tell It?” featuring mixed media and watercolor illustrations.
Through a special collaboration between Gallery 14 and the Vero Beach Art Club, Peloquin will offer a three-day workshop at the nearby VBAC Annex. Entitled Drawing and Painting on Mixed Media Collage, the workshop will take place from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Nov. 12-14.
“A lot of people who take my workshops have never done mixed media. They do watercolor, or they do oil painting. I like introducing other techniques to them. I want people to add new techniques to what they do already, to be able to find their own voice, their own palette and their own way of doing things,” says Peloquin.
For more information about the class, visit verobeachartclub.org/workshops. For show details, visit gallery14verobeach.com.
Photos by Kaila Jones
