Alex graduated from The University of Alberta in 2007, earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts with Distinction. Since that time Alex has been honing her skills and building her career as an artist, while making a living operating her own hair salon on Vancouver Island, where she lives with her young family.
Painting and drawing has long been a way for me to explore, connect, or respond to my environment, to others, and to myself. This way of integrating my world has evolved to focus on an abstract aesthetic, one where the layering and repetition of line is both playful and meditative, and where mark-making is spontaneous and gestural, but most of all candid. My desire is that impact of the final image be one of lightness, inquiry, and authenticity.
I respond to what’s in front of me.
I’ve been cutting hair for over 20 years, so I started by painting people. Antithetical to an industry driven tendency towards a hyper-polished image of people, I was fascinated with the unedited raw versions of people, their grit and genuine nature. So, I started painting portraits and figures attempting to capture that rawness.
Next, when I started painting florals, it was similar. I wasn’t trying to produce the cliché of a flower, an overly prettied version. Instead, they were studies in movement, colour, and light; an essential energy that brought their embodied nature into a space and changed that space as a result. And I’m still working with flowers; trying to capture that essence.
Recently, the letter series began when I saw my son write his first letter. Copying him inspired me to be more playful, quiet, and accepting of my work. My encounter with his learning and effort of forming these abstract forms and concepts of letters transcended their simple use as a method of communication; they were felt, real, hard earned, and personal. Through repetition, in copying and practicing these early letters they took on a representational value in my work. That is, they became either more figurative or formulated a kind of scene or a space. Ultimately, this process became meditative.
Regardless of the subject matter; whether figure, flower, letters, or even the environments they sometimes create, as the works evolve I’m attempting to both refine, as well as highlight, what emerges as most authentic in my relationship to the subject.
~ Alex Peck-Whyte
Alex’s paintings are in various corporate and private collections throughout Canada.
“Alex’s work is fresh, thought provoking and somehow moving. My reaction to her work was immediate and I was really excited to bring Alex into the gallery.”