Peg Baraby, Abstract Art, Experimental Art

Variation on a Theme by Osborne (1999)                                                 Oil on Masonite  30 x 24"

      Photo Credit ~ ©Geoff Wyatt

Join us Friday & Saturday, 12 - 8pm  May 24 - 25th, 2024

15 W. Placer - Helena, MT

(formerly Helena Community Yoga)

                       Peggy Jo Baraby

                             American Artist 1933 - 2015

Peg Baraby is a Montana Artist, Helena native and life-long resident. She graduated from Carroll College in 1971 with a B.A. magna cum laude in Fine Arts, and a minor in Philosophy. Her honors were in part awarded for her senior thesis on natural pigments and the series of watercolors she made after collecting the materials and creating the colors. These works of art are as bright today as when she painted them. While her art defied many of the established genres, she most closely painted in the spirit of the Abstract Expressionists and Lyrical Expressionists. Her art speaks of Nature, whether through color field, line drawings or color washes.

Peg was also influenced by her favorite artists, Richard Diebenkorn, Helen Frankenthaler, and Maxine Masterfield, who offered a private weeklong artmaking workshop in Florida in 2004. Over the decades Peg Baraby worked mainly in oil, acrylic, and mixed media collage on paper and was a Signature Member of the International Society of Experimental Artists. Her work was exhibited in Montana, in solo shows and Helena’s annual juried Electrum exhibitions. Other work was exhibited in juried shows in Texas, Michigan, Idaho, Indiana, and British Columbia. Her travels took her to the Hawaiian Islands, Curacao, Mexico, Spain, Portugal, Morocco, the Grand Canyon, and across the U.S. She gathered inspiration for her artworks from these travels and her imagination.

“I paint to recapture and communicate my joy and sense of wonder of the colors, light, textures, lines, and forms that surround me in Nature. Rather than capture a moment in time from a specific location, as a traditional landscape painter might, I attempt to paint the essence of nature. I feel that in some true sense and sensibility of things, that this essence flows through me and is best achieved, at least while beginning a new painting, by exercising a maximum lack of control over the paint: I allow the paint to flow across the canvas.”

A retrospective of paintings

Lyrical Abstractions & Expressions of Nature

1960 - 2012