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.
Being a hairstylist for over 25 years, connecting with people everyday, It’s not surprising I was drawn to portraiture. Antithetical to an industry driven tendency towards a hyper-polished image of people, I was fascinated with the unedited versions, drawing and painting as natural and raw an image possible.
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.
Now…The last year and a half has been for me, as for many others, a time where I was forced to slow down and simply settle. Removing the constant extraneous stimulation typical of normal life allowed me to focus on the internal rather than the external, the existing rather than the impending. I took these lessons into the studio, revisiting materials, re-evaluating artistic intent and reframing original inspiration. The resulting new collage series embraces and reimagines these latent creative expressions through the timely lens of containment, clarity and stillness.
Regardless of the subject matter, 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.”