Peggy Robinson: Cracked
Most of us no longer really see the city we live in. We walk or drive through it preoccupied with our thoughts or, if we’re consumers of the news media, apprehensive. Received thinking about the city is that the streets contain only fear and danger and that all its pleasures are locked up, accessible only to those with money. If, however, we happen to turn off the streets we’ve become incapable of seeing and cut through the Chicago Cultural Center, we’ll come across a quite different vision of our city’s streets in the paintings of Peggy Robinson. We’ll also learn to see the city again.
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There is nothing photographic about Robinson’s approach, and yet her city scenes seem more real than photographs. Their remarkable reality comes from Robinson’s imaginative use of perspective, scale, color, and detail–though it’s rarely possible to pin down the precise location, one seems to recognize a particular street corner, even an alley. Comments in the exhibition guest book testify over and over again to the experience of having been in these places, having seen them.
All of Robinson’s paintings are oil on panel. And all are small in scale, giving them an intimate quality, as if the street corner were someone’s home or some other valued possession. They do vary in size, however, with dimensions as small as about 9 inches and as large as 36. The size of the works has been determined by the old frames the artist found for them–like her images, found while wandering the streets. In fact, delight in city strolling informs every aspect of these works: Robinson seems a flaneur of 1990s Chicago. Elizabeth Wilson describes the 19th-century Parisian flaneur as a detached observer. “He caught the fleeting, fragmentary quality of modern urban life, and, as a rootless outsider, he also identified with all the marginals that urban society produced.”
