Meet The Artist Whose Paintings Distill The Sensations of Nature

Artist Madeline Peckenpaugh in her studio.

New York-based Madeline Peckenpaugh paints using the language of landscape. Her large-scale oil paintings often evoke scenes of nature, with vertical swipes conjuring tall grasses, reeds and tree trunks, and horizontal fields of color signifying bodies of water or open fields. At the same time, her abstract gestural style takes her scenes out of the real world. “They are about landscape, but they’re not about nature,” explains the artist.

In her Queens studio, painter Madeline Peckenpaugh frequently uses her hands to apply oil paint.

In her Queens studio, painter Madeline Peckenpaugh frequently uses her hands to apply oil paint.

The painting Sunbathers is typical of Peckenpaugh’s abstract style that plays with depth by drawing attention to the canvas surface.

The painting Sunbathers is typical of Peckenpaugh’s abstract style that plays with depth by drawing attention to the canvas surface.

The artist begins her compositions by mixing a color palette.

The artist begins her compositions by mixing a color palette.

For Peckenpaugh, who studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and the Rhode Island School of Design, nature is a way to invite the viewer inside her painterly worlds, yet it’s not necessarily the subject of her work. “It’s often about the sublime experience you can feel in nature, or at least the one that I did as a kid growing up on 42 acres of land in Wisconsin,” she reflects.

This formative landscape of prairies, woods and marshes became her first visual language. More recently, it has been supplemented with an urban vocabulary accumulated from years of city living and foreign travels, places Peckenpaugh often photographs with her iPhone and translates into her spatial compositions.

The artist’s consuming, encompassing paintings typically begin with a color story and take shape in a single sitting. She first mixes her paints to create a palette before applying them to the canvas with gloved hands and an assortment of brushes and tools. “I try to get the idea of the space out in one session,” she reveals. “It’s often a matter of letting the paint guide me.”

It is easy to get carried away in Peckenpaugh’s worlds, where scenes draw the viewer from the surface to the foreground to a distant vanishing point and back to the surface again. The artist often plays with depth, scraping off areas of paint with a handheld sander, or combining textures at the outset by using fabric dyes to tint her canvases. “I like the transition of materials, but there has to be some kind of poetry in the combining,” she explains. “There’s a back-and-forth to looking at a painting as materials but also as an image.”

Now, as Peckenpaugh prepares for a series of exhibits in Milan and Miami in 2024 as well as a showing with her gallery, Alexander Berggruen, at the Dallas Art Fair, she is open to where her materials might take her. Notes the artist, “I often think about paint as being its own force of nature.”

Photos: Nico Schinco