Peggy Thayer has been a practicing painter for 30 years, working in a variety
of media including acrylics, watercolors, pastels, and oils. Her recent landscapes
portray her relationship with Nature. She has been a year round Vineyard resident
for 10 years. She is currently adjunct faculty in the Transpersonal and Consciousness Studies Program at Akamai University.
Her most recent book, "Elderscence: the Gift of Longevity," is available from Hamilton books and her first book, "The Experience of Being Creative as a Spiritual Practice," is available from Peter Lang.
Her educational background includes undergraduate studies in Fine Arts at Goddard College, VT, the Worcester Art Museum School, MA, as well as the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. She has completed graduate work in East-West Psychology and Consciousness Studies at John F. Kennedy University, Orinda, CA, and the California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco, CA, where she completed her doctoral dissertation on The Experience of Being Creative as a Spiritual Practice.
Her work has been shown in Burlington, VT, San Francisco, CA, as well as most recently
on the Vineyard at the Featherstone Center for the Arts, the Dragonfly Gallery and the Artisans
Faire. Describing her painting practice she writes:
"My creative process involves bringing into form an unseen feeling, idea, insight. The way in which the unseen will manifest is not always known ahead of time. It is in the process of forming that this 'something' takes shape. In painting it is an interplay between myself and the object I am portraying. Gradually, as the process continues, I begin to become the object, begin to feel what the object feels like, being itself. If I am painting the rocks of a cliff overhanging the ocean, I am solid, yet flowing in the shapes and colors of the clay and sand as they form rock. I, in a sense, go through, or echo the original creation of that cliff by the ocean as it takes shape on the white page, through colors on my paint brush. Each stroke reforms what I see. I feel my whole body is involved, I am the brush, the paint, the stroke, the cliff. Through this interplay between canvas and object and myself comes a deep sense of connection. I am connected to my work, connected to my self, connected to the earth, connected to the unseen, which is greater than I am, the Source. At times I feel it is this source, this creative force that forms and maintains all life, that is speaking through me."