(Image: Lorraine Peltz, Chandelier- Pink, 2010, Oil and acrylic on canvas, 40" x 40"; © Lorraine Peltz)

Lorraine Peltz’s paintings are complex ruminations on the nature of private identity and public persona. Using imagery culled from both personal history and the contemporary moment, they reference both past and present. The chandelier conjures a remembered culture and the patterned flowers, starbursts, and decorative flourishes present the now – particularly women’s fantasy and desires - through pure painterly pleasure. Peltz joins various painting languages including recognizable imagery, signs and symbols, and painterly abstraction, mimicking how information comes to us and how meaning is made, bit by bit -- real life alongside memory, poetry next to prose, in order to illuminate the larger issues surrounding identity and place that concern us all.

(Image: Lorraine Peltz, Flowergirl, 2004, Oil on Canvas, 35" x 36"; © Lorraine Peltz)

Her works become landscapes of both the exterior world and an interior space of dream, desire, and memory. In a recent essay about the work, Lisa Wainwright, Dean of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, has written: “Both of nature and from culture, her icons speak to the polemic between essentialism and social construction that still grips feminist discourse. They are a mix of aesthetic delight and conceptual reading.”

Education: MFA, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, Midway Studio Prize, 1983. BFA, State University of New York at New Paltz, New Paltz, NY, 1980.

More about Lorraine Peltz ...here.