Peggy Hinaekian

Atmospheric and lyrical paintings in mixed media on canvas and on paper.
 
 

Interview_with_artist_Peggy_Hinaekian.mht (click to get full interview) 

The Imaginary Travels of Hinaekian By Michel Aebischer (excerpt)
Extract from article in Paris Match magazine, (Swiss edition) November 3, 2006 (translated from French):

     Present in numerous private and corporate collections, the artist is a descendant of a long lineage of Armenian artists and decorators.  Hinaekian was born in Egypt and it is from their that that emanates her two favorite colors: the orange of the Sinai desert and the turquoise blue of the gardens of Alexandria.  And water of course, this blue "gold" so precious between the leaden skies and the burnt surface of the earth.
     Her travels took her to Canada, where "deprived of the desert" in the middle of all that snow, she produced paintings evoking her birthplace.  Montreal, then New York, where still very young she worked as a fashion designer with the creator of Jackie Kennedy's wedding dress.
     She went to Geneva, Switzerland at the end of the 60's which remains one of her anchors, the other being the United States, the place of her needs for aquatic domains.  "Sitting on the water's edge I dream of colors before thinking of forms".  The artist expresses herself in colors and forms, undecided in the beginning of the process, without a preparatory sketch or idea.  She guides the image, even though abstract, there is always a subject - even windows when she first started to paint - by superposition and progressive juxtapositions of her colors and collages.  Over here, a sandy patch or an expanse of water or perhaps a no man's land where nothing is obstructed or limited.  Over there, a structure, an island, mud houses close together on their patio, a mirage, an ossified mass in the sands where a graphic incision, often red or orange, brings to light in our view, like the squares of glass where a ray of sunshine makes it suddenly shine and without which we would perhaps have not seen it.
     "When I feel that I can no longer advance in my emotions, I know that the painting is finished and I can no longer add anything to it."
      Hinaekian has been influenced at a very young age by the magic of the world and transmits it to us in great strides with her customary joy.  The artist loves also to remember her older practice of etchings where figures, mostly feminine, insert themselves in a world reminiscent of Chagall.  The world of her etchings is closed but she still creates today works on paper where engraved forms, painted and collaged, play in their fusion a great formal purity.  In a way they are small Zen paintings which one can visualize as a Japanese Garden to take away.

Article in Galleries Newsletter, Lausanne, 2008 (translation) by V. Messier
Peggy Hinaekian is an American artist of Armenian origin who was born in Egypt. She is present in numerous private and corporate collections in the U.S. and in Europe and has exhibited extensively across the world in both one-man shows as well as in international biennales and art fairs. Hinaekian lives and works in Switzerland and the U.S. She is primarily a colorist and it is from her native Egypt that emerges two of her favorite colors: the reddish orange of the Sinai desert and the turquoise blue of the Mediterranean Sea. She is very much influenced by the desert and the water; While she expresses herself in colors and shapes, much is left undetermined at the onset of the creative process. There are nopreparatory sketches or ideas.  Even though the expression is at first predominantly abstract, she guides it towards a focal point, inviting the viewer to wander within the paintings and be part of the emotions they provoke. As she points out: "When I feel I can no longer advance in my own emotions and feelings, I know that the painting is finished and I can no longer add anything to it." Peggy Hinaekian's paintings contain a lyrical undertone and exude simultaneously a certain atmosphere of calm and joy. Some of her work has a nebula like quality suggesting infinite distances in atmospheric fields of color, whether small and whimsical or large and bathed in vast expanses of color.
 
FIRE and BLUE (by Art Historian, Danielle Junod-Sugnaux, PhD
Peggy Hinaekian, dynamic, venturesome, avid traveler, her life divided between the U.S.A and Switzerland, works non-stop. Irradiating a communicative energy, her paintings in acrylic and oil on canvas are present in numerous private and corporate collections, particularly in financial institutions in Switzerland. Her works are very much in demand and she exhibits at a relentless rhythm in Switzerland, Austria, Germany, France, USA, England, Canada and Kuwait. The secret of her success? Other than her passion for painting, her talents as a colorist are certainly a possible answer and this, in spite of a palette that entails two essential colors: orange and blue, where one to the exclusion of the other covers the whole canvas.
The paintings in orange tones seem like great fields of color burnt by the sun. The vast spaces, almost monochromatic, are however animated by a rich irregular texture, sprinkled by small grains of sand as though blown by the desert wind. It is the space, the infinite, the inhabited silence which predominate her works, and then the discovery at the very centre, or in a corner, of small zones sprinkled with signs scratched in the wet paint, or of a colored square bluntly cut, or of a sign inscribed as a sort of characteristic description. These are signs inviting the eye to decipher and discover the path, in order to penetrate at the heart of the painting and capture its essence.
 In other paintings, certain spaces consist of a light incisive, mysterious handwriting whose profound meaning the artist alone can know. The blue paintings have the same technique and savoir-faire, depicting geometric forms in full or in void, of colored squares inscribed or overlapping rectangles or other squares, at the center or on the edge of the canvas, painted with a free hand and audacity, in the image of the artist who likes to communicate, without any detours, her passion for color and texture. The surface of the canvas is dense, structured, luminous and worked in various tints. The blue fields of color, evoking beaches where water and sky merge and unite, blend the aquatic and the spiritual. The red/orange canvases, on the contrary, are full of life, fire and light.
The work of Peggy Hinaekian is a source of life and creation, generous and enriching to discover.

Article in LUXE magazine, South Florida edition, vol.8, issue 1, winter 2010.
"Contemporary painter Peggy Hinaekian's art is driven by an instinctive and spontaneous quality.  A self-proclaimed colorist, she uses powerful pigments ro make a statement with her lyrical and abstract atmospheric works."

Article in E/news magazine "The Armenian Reporter", February 2010. (Arts and Culture)

HINAEKIAN, Red Desertscapes and Reveries in Blue

 

 

Although the artist remains loyal to herself and her style, her recent work irradiates a breath of fresh air. Her residences in Florida and California induce her to travel frequently from the East to the West. Warm and iridescent, inundated with light and layered with dominating reds and oranges, these new paintings sensually translate the sands burnt by the relentless desert sun as it unravels under the gazing eye of the artist traversing vast American landscapes. 

A passionate and intrepid traveler, Peggy Hinaekian is also a sagacious observant. Her eye is constantly on alert, and she beholds fleeting details, mnemonically engraving events—passages of sense and time—as they occur before her.  In turn, they are transcribed momentarily, here and there, in the shape of a tenuous trace, a pictorial mark thrown surreptitiously on canvas like an etched note or a drawing sketched at a table’s corner, as to not elude the artist creative impulse. Elsewhere in the confines of the image, a sign, testimony of an instant in life, is brushed in space as if suspended. 

In observing the pictorial field a little closer, however, what discoveries and what riches! The surface is animated, underlying layers are discovered, modulating the appearance of desert-like fields and providing enough space for small blue surfaces.  Like drops quenching the thirst of the spectator, they haptically bring him or her a touch of indispensible reverie. The blue paintings are filled with poetry. In contrast to those bathing in red tones, they are determined, full of life, and in some way the mark of the author, which can also be found in the monotypes. The latter represents a new venue for the artist to express her sensibility, and at the same time an enriching experience for the travelling observer who decides to rest on its shores. 

Dr. Danielle Junod-Sugnaux, Art Historian

[Translated by Vartan P. Messier] 

The work of Peggy Hinaekian figures in numerous private and corporate collections, notably in various financial institutions and pharmaceutical companies in Switzerland.  She exhibits frequently in Switzerland, Austria, France, the UK, Norway, Canada, Koweit, and, as of recent date, particularly in the USA.