Lorraine Peltz is talking about her painting Infinity, which shows seven lipsticks lined up against a pink background. “If you’re a serious artist you certainly aren’t making a pink painting,” Peltz says, explaining that she’s attempting to reclaim the color, freeing pink from its association with little girls’ bedrooms. “This pink has to do with the body. It sort of looks like skin.
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In Charm Bracelet, 12 different kitchen implements are arranged against a red background full of tomatoes, painted with a stencil Peltz cut from cardboard. She points out “the tomato’s connection to the kitchen. Also women are sometimes called tomatoes; I’ve been called a tomato.” The kitchen implements form “the shape of a clock, so they imply the ongoing experience that one has day and night in the home. I think it’s a pleasurable painting: red, juicy.” But there are so many tomatoes that “it’s also kind of horrific. There’s a kind of explosion of tomatoes–they’re taking over.”
Peltz’s work was mostly abstract when she moved here from New York in 1981 for graduate study at the U. of C. A stress on content in the art program and Chicago’s weather helped make her paintings more representational: “The wind that blows in Chicago blew away all that extraneous stuff and clarified for me my agenda as a painter.” Soon she painted Shoes, which depicted the same pair of her shoes that are central to her recent work Stepping Out. The shoes appear worn and “imply a body, a woman. But there’s no buckle, there’s no bow. They don’t really tell very much about her. This is connected to why I don’t paint figures.” Peltz is after the essence of the object rather than showing the shoes of someone specific.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Nathan Mandell.
