“A carefully caged bird or a neatly arranged still life won’t live long. Sometimes disarray is a sign of life – it’s a secret that island existence has taught painter Peggy Brunton well. You find some real jewels around here, says Brunton, but you need a little ugliness to appreciate the beauty. Brunton says she likes to throw in the odd wilted flower or some muddy colors to keep the sense of spontaneity alive in her paintings. And she says she’s always, ready to be surprised, referring with a cheeky smile to the roadside entrepreneurs and deserted schooners she discovered on her rambles. Now anyone can enjoy the fruits of her labor and feast their eyes on the paintings that have been hidden away in her studio for so many months.Island Reflections, a collection of work drawing on Brunton’s 30 years of experience on the island, is on display at Bainbridge Arts and Crafts. Brunton’s depictions of shopkeepers and farms and gardens, of people rushing to ferries and sauntering down lanes, focus on all aspects of the Bainbridge lifestyle, from its social life to its natural charms. Yet for all the familiarity of Brunton’s subject matter, the abundance of her style is decidedly her own.I battle to get away from the sweet, she says, to keep the vigour and excitement of it all. The greens and reds, yellows and purples of her paintings bear testimony to her preference for oppositional colors to complementary ones, and she says that she hates for either her subjects or viewers to be passive. I like things with a rough-and-ready character, she says.And Brunton has plenty of joie de vivre. She recalls without the rub of an eye how she stayed up all night to finish her exhibition paintings, and thinks nothing of turning a canvas upside down and starting again if her work starts to feel stale. Furthermore, she says that each of her oil paintings requires several sketches and photos before she even begins working in her studio. Not that she’s complaining. Deciding what to draw is like looking for a miracle she says. Of course it takes time. No one who has seen her work could argue. Her paintings’ titles reveal her artist’s instinct for those moments when a single image evokes a multitude of meanings – a boat filled with flowers becomes A Floating Garden, while Thickly Painted Duo refers with sly self-referentiality to the thickly textured painting itself, as well as to the thickly painted boats in the frame.It is with characteristic quick-wittedness that Brunton cites her one shortcoming. I had no maid, she jokes. Even the poorest Impressionist painters had someone to set up their easel en plein air and fix their sandwiches. But Monet and the like would have to admit that she manages pretty well without. They would have admired her bold brush strokes and sensitivity to light, and it is the American Impressionist John Singer-Sargent, who Brunton cites as her hero. She says she admires his ability to use color boldly and to shock his viewer without disrupting the composure of his paintings.I aim for a sense of balance too, she says. It’s quite a task to keep impressionism and realism and a sense of the abstract in perspective. For Brunton can be patient as well as impromptu. She can describe how a two- hour painting finished at four in the morning just worked, and ponder the influence of an island population increase from 7,000 to 20,000 upon her work, in terms someone who’s rarely held a brush can understand. She also knows what every pupil needs to hear – sometimes its better to forget what’s been taught, she says, and just paint.Small wonder Brunton cites her experiences teaching at Cornish Art School, Seattle Pacific University and Bush as crucial to her development as an artist. However, she says she’s happy to be concentrating on painting alone for the moment. I’m simple she says, gesturing toward a multitude of carefully conceived and warmly executed paintings with a flamboyance that silences contradiction. I think you need to be – after all, the greatest joy is simply telling a story.* * * * *Island Reflections can be seen June 3 through June 25 at Bainbridge Arts and Crafts. There will be a gallery talk at 2 p.m. June 3, and a reception 1 – 4 p.m. June 4.”