Peggy Espinel @_lapeggy
Artist Statement
I create drawings, prints, and mixed media work that explore memory, identity, and the quiet narratives embedded in everyday life. My practice is grounded in observation and visual storytelling, often drawing from personal experience, cultural memory, and the rhythm of daily scenes.
As a bilingual artist and longtime educator, I approach image-making as a form of communication—intuitive, intimate, and accessible. Much of my work is figurative and gestural, focused on capturing a moment mid-thought, mid-motion, or mid-silence. These glimpses are both real and imagined: a seated figure waiting, a quiet domestic space, a glance exchanged. The people and places in my work often reflect inner states—tenderness, fatigue, stillness, or longing.
I work primarily with pencil, ink, watercolor, acrylic, oil, printmaking ink, and traditional processes like etching, lithography, and monotype. I’m drawn to these mediums because of their physicality and their connection to time—both in terms of process and memory. The slowness of the work allows me to reflect, revise, and build a visual language that feels both deeply personal and widely resonant.
Ultimately, I’m interested in what remains unsaid—the pauses, the quiet gestures, the spaces between people. My goal is not to illustrate stories, but to hold space for them: for the viewer to recognize something of themselves, or someone they’ve known, in the work.
Bio:
Peggy Irene Espinel Silvers was born in New Jersey and raised in Dallas, Texas. Her work is shaped by a multicultural background, with family roots in Ecuador and Colombia, as well as lived experiences in Mexico and Germany. These influences inform her ongoing exploration of identity, place, and cultural hybridity.
Espinel earned a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts and has maintained a lifelong studio practice rooted in drawing and mixed media. Coming from a family of creatives — including a grandfather who was a painter — she has been making art from an early age. She lives and works in Dallas.