“I’m not a photographer. I’m not a printer,” says Peggy Turner Zablotny. “I’m a designer, an artist.” Although her artwork is made up of photographic images, her true medium is organic material.
Ms. Zablotny creates botanical compositions — marvelously intricate stylized collages using nothing but dried pressed flowers, leaves, ferns, and other greenery. The carefully wrought arrangements are then photographed and blown up into colorful, fantastical gardens of the imagination.
Although she might more appropriately be described as a flower arranger of sorts, the big difference is that her work is not ephemeral, and there’s a lot more design sense that goes into each of her detailed creations.
Everything — every focal point, as well as every inch of background pattern and color — is made up of flora and other plant material. It’s a painstaking process that begins in her own garden. Ms. Zablotny grows many of the flowers that she uses and presses. For each image, she sifts through the thousands of specimens she has collected and curated over the years to find the perfect combination. The images are multilayered with various colors, shapes, veins, tendrils, transparency, and textural qualities — all combining to form a remarkably complex image.
“Sometimes I have a total image,” says Ms. Zablotny. “Other times I put stuff out and I react to what’s in front of me. A lot of it is intuitive. Sometimes whatever I press on a certain day will become a composition.”
Some images are interpretations. A few years back, Ms. Zablotny was given a commission by the Martha’s Vineyard Chamber Music Society to create an image inspired by a piece of music. Another one of her works honored the victims of the 9/11 attacks, and is part of an exhibit in New York City which still hangs in a number of New York office buildings.
Ms. Zablotny has also created site-specific pieces utilizing the bounty of the gardens of the Polly Hill Arboretum and the Thompson Mansion in Monmouth County, N.Y.
Previously, Ms. Zablotny showed her work at the Field Gallery in West Tisbury and the former Dragonfly Gallery in Oak Bluffs. Now she has launched a new website, peggyturnerzablotny.com, which presents her botanical compositions from 1994 to today, and features her images as high-quality fine art prints and scarves, as well as cards and a poster.
The silk scarves are the newest addition to Ms. Zablotny’s collection. Each one is custom-printed in California with a design that can be hand-selected from the artist’s catalog of images.
The website itself reflects the design backgrounds of both Ms. Zablotny and her husband Steve (they met while they were both students at the Philadelphia College of Art). The couple have run a graphic design business called Z Studio for years. They specialize in graphic design, exhibit design, signage, and color consultation for a number of businesses and organizations.
Mr. Zablotny used his technology and design background to create the site. A bit of a perfectionist, he had to do quite a lot of research to find the right platform to enable his vision. “I literally had to wait until the technology caught up with my ideas,” he says. “There was a standard that I wanted to achieve that wasn’t possible until recently.”
The site is set up magazine-style, with a series of pages that can be easily flipped through. The first section features a good deal of background and information about the artist’s process, accompanied by photos and isolated quotes from the artist and reviews of her work, making for a very attractive, engaging format. Soon an online store will be available on the site for direct purchase of Ms. Zablotny’s work.
“We’re trying to have that sort of conversational feel to the website,” says Mr. Zablotny of the collaboration between himself and his wife. “We want people to get to know Peggy first and then view the art.”
The bulk of the site is devoted to images of the prints, divided into galleries. Flipping through the virtual galleries gives the viewer the opportunity to visit a huge body of work not limited to the confines of a physical gallery.
Each collage represents a unique visual bouquet. It’s amazing to see the variety that nature has provided, and the innumerable ways that the artist has combined natural beauty to create these striking images, many of which have the look of a painting.
“The way the abstract expressionists responded to colors and brushstrokes, Peggy responds to flowers,” says Mr. Zablotny.