PEGGY CYPHERS
Dove, acrylic, sand, and gold on canvas, 16" x 16", 2013

Peggy Cyphers is a New York based artist who works in painting, printmaking, and multi-media.  Cyphers has shown nationally and internationally since her first solo show in 1984, receiving reviews in The New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, and The New York Observer, among other publications.  She is a Professor of Fine Art at Pratt Institute. Her gallery affiliations include The Proposition Gallery in New York, Creon Gallery in New York, and Noma Gallery in San Francisco.  Cyphers is the recipient of many awards for her work, such as the Peter S. Reed Foundation Award, the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Award, and an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.  She will be an artist-in-residence at Grin City Collective in Grinnell, Iowa this spring.

Dove (Private Collection) is from the series "Animal Spirits" (2008-2013)

About the artist's work:

"Animal Spirits is a series of paintings which reflects on mental and physical spaces of weightlessness and expansive consciousness. The images focus on predatory birds for inspiration - their colors, patterns, and a sense of gravitational and mental freedom.

Peggy Cyphers' work reflects her obsession with the writings of Charles Darwin, specifically the interconnectedness of all living species. He was one of the earliest proponents of animal rights and did studies of emotions in animals, which led to the founding of the Anti-Vivisection Society in Britian.

Cyphers' paintings use abstract characters that weave into vibratory spaces which calm sensory perception. The process is an automatic writing streaming between cultural, geological, and primordial time, with roots in Eastern, Native American, and Modernist traditions."

Peggy Cyphers's website