BIOGRAPHY
Margaret (“Peggy”) Dunham Griggs will be rightly remembered by many as one of the great artists of the 20th century. Her remarkable paintings graced numerous museums and galleries, including the prestigious Hudson River Museum in New York.
In the 1980s, Griggs displayed her philanthropic spirit by donating land and buildings to establish the Watershed Center for Ceramic Arts. This 200-acre ceramic art residence community in Newcastle/Edgecomb, Maine, continues to serve as an affordable haven for serious ceramic artists to pursue their artistic passion. Additionally, she contributed a remarkable 55-acre parcel along the Sheepscot River to the Sheepscot Valley Conservation Association, known as the "Griggs Preserve," which stands as the Association's oldest public preserve.
In the early 70s, Griggs also played a pivotal role in establishing Damariscotta River Association. Today, this association owns 31 properties spanning over 700 acres and holds 40 conservation easements covering an additional 1,350 acres along the Damariscotta River in southern Maine. Then, in 1980, she donated a large parcel of riverfront land adjacent to the Watershed Center to the Sheepscot Valley Conservation Association (now the Midcoast Conservancy), now accessible to the public with walking trails and scenic vistas.
Her art includes a diversity of nature-related themes - sunlight and fire, earth and stone, waters and seascape, sky, and wind, that give rise to emotions within us worthy of reflection and appreciation of being one with nature.
"Aztec Sculpture"
My mother, Margaret Traylor Dunham-Griggs (né Margaret Traylor Dunham), was born in 1923 in Atlanta, Georgia, to Margaret Traylor and Thomas Dunham. Thomas hailed from Boston, a Yankee New Englander/Northerner who moved to the South for business. Margaret was a true Southerner, raised in that conservative social fabric laden with strict etiquette and rules for girls and young ladies.
My mother grew up in that Southern world but creatively carved out her own special world of art and freedom within it. She was a peaceful rebel, determined to follow her own dreams and spirit.
"Self Portrait 1959"
Of her childhood, she recalled how much she loved going to the seashore, spending hours with her best friend running up and down the vast swaths of white sand, treasure-hunting for the most beautiful seashells. Of drawing then she recalls drawing since she was “very little.” “I loved climbing trees,” my mother shared. She told me one story: “Near the school, I climbed way out on a tree limb and fell. Lost my breath. My teacher scolded me, ‘Girls should not climb trees. Only boys climb trees. It’s not lady-like and told me not to climb trees.” Naturally, my mother thought that mentality was misguided and silly, and she continued climbing trees and seashell treasure-hunting in free abandon.
Mom was very smart and soared ahead of her classmates. She was placed not just one but two years ahead, suddenly in class with children two or three years older. Then the principal decided to put her back a year so she would “not “stand out” and be among kids closer to her age.
Somehow, she managed to “escape” from the South and its norms and, at age 17, convinced her parents to move to New York City and enter the prestigious Art Students League. There, she studied under fine artists and loved the chance to be single-minded in her artistic resolve— painting. One teacher she remembers well was Yasuo Kuniyoshi, the lesser of two famous Kuniyoshi painters of Japan. She recalls him encouraging her to stay focused on her art, telling her he may become the best artist of that time and she the second best. Even at that age, her natural affinity for Japanese/Asian art and its subtle, refined aesthetic sensibilities and love of nature was apparent. Although she never adopted the style or rules of any Japanese, Chinese, or other Asian “school,” the impact of Asian artistic sensibility is present in her art with its abstract nature-based subjects and appreciation of challenging expanses of negative space. For instance, in some of her black and white ink works, it is easy to see the near-forms of Kanji, the Japanese word characters, in her drawing of waves and reeds along a seashore. In another painting, the abstract forms of a samurai jacket are visible, and in a landscape, a tree reflects the iconic wind-driven shapes of a Japanese bonsai.
My mother married in her early twenties. In the next five years, she had three children, a girl and two boys. She divorced eight years later and eventually moved with us to Woodstock, New York. For four years, we lived there, then a serious artists colony, peacefully embedded in an otherwise rural farming community and small village of ordinary shops. Woodstock harbored famous writers, theatre and film artists, musicians, painters, potters, and silkscreen artists, all enjoying a loose-knit community of like mind and purpose, art. Wherever we resided, my mother always dedicated one room or space as her “studio.” She routinely painted while we were at school. I remember the smell of oil paints and turpentine as I neared our Woodstock home and passed her studio before the front door. She would also paint portraits, which were always of exceptional quality, to bring in income during the financially difficult years.
Mom remarried in 1963 to Maitland Griggs, an art lover/connoisseur and collector. He built a new art studio for my mother. It was there she spent the next couple of decades painting, focused and productive. Besides painting, my mother really liked landscaping, not making cute flower beds, but creatively contouring pathways around the property, defined by ferns, flora, special stones she had collected, and reflective water features to beautify and enjoy. Just another “canvas.”
ADIRONDACK MOUNTAINS –– DEEP IMPRESSIONS
"October in the Woods"
Her parents, my grandparents, owned a summer house in the Adirondacks, surrounded by forest and with an expansive view of rock-faced Giant Mountain. Before we were born, my mother spent summers there, hiking in these pristine forests and climbing the grand peaks.
The giant palette of nature forms and colors of this wilderness landscape inspired her. She drew smooth, silvery, bulbous boulders jutting out of black streams, rust-colored lichen layered over logs, knotty patterns of birch bark, “wood ghosts” (Indian Pipes), unfurling Fiddlehead ferns, silky water grasses in marshy inlets, evening skies of mustard to mauve to maroon pastels.
One summer, she volunteered as a hiking guide for children and teens, taking groups on one-day hikes up the Adirondack mountains, helping them appreciate the wonders of the forest and marvel at the intricate textures of a piece of tree bark and pine cone or muse at how long it took a stream to carve a rock smooth.
NATURE — LIFELONG INSPIRATION
"Sea Ledge in Maine"
My mother drew…. drew a lot, sketched always, and painted a lot. She found her source and affinity in the abstract forms in nature. Her art studio told the story. Near her main easel, bordering the edges of several big drafting tables were an array of collected things she had found on hikes and walks that inspired her–– a twisted boney driftwood swaddled in dried seaweed from the Maine Coast, a half-moon white, tree fungus, a huge Tahoe pine cone, red oxide-colored chestnuts, wrinkled, ochre/salmon autumn oak leaves, rocks, seashells of all spiral shapes and hues—nature’s incredibly beautiful handiwork always in her sight. Yes, there were also shelves of art books; most of them though were photographic books of nature.
I asked my mother, “Why do humans paint, or do any art, when nature is so beautiful and impossible to approximate in any art form? Why not just look at nature to enjoy beauty? Why art?” She quickly replied something like: “The artist versus nature… that’s not the question. People like art and artists because humans like to see what other humans can see, can do, can create.” The inference for me was that humans know full well that we are incapable of rendering the beauty nature produces/is, but we can empathetically appreciate beauty in the world in new ways as communicated by the artist.
PACIFIST
"Waterfall"
My mother was a pacifist. She had lived through WWII mostly as a young woman working on tractors in Maine’s potato fields to provide food for those in the armed services. Now, in the 1960s, she was an adult and this war was not something she felt she could just “get through” or ignore. She was sickened by the brutish, immoral cruelty of the war (or any war) and its mass killings. To her, it was utterly senseless––– Carpet-bombing, slaughtering, burning humans alive -- especially innocent Vietnamese civilians and soldiers on both sides. I understood later that she viewed the rationale “The commies are coming” as idiotic. Around 1961, my mother decided she could not paint, silently sit by while such cruelty was going on and took a leave of absence from her art, and devoted herself fully for several years to the anti-war efforts. She collaborated with anti-war movement leaders, writing letters and meeting with senators and congressmen, and assisting in organizing community meetings, and participating in anti-war marches.
I remember her during this period, not in her studio, but at her desk, piled with papers, every day, typing letters, reading newspapers…. up late at night after we had gone to bed. Though very taxing emotionally, she nevertheless pursued anti-Vietnam war work until the war eventually ended. I recall for several years she was shadowed by an FBI agent, tracking her activities. Gradually, following the Vietnam War, she resumed painting again, including drawings that evoked the horror she felt from the killing of civilian children.
Volcano series
HER STYLE
Over the years, she had an expanse of “styles.” Mediums changed–– oils, acrylics, pastels, ink, watercolors. Tools were brushes, palette knives, sponges, palms, and fingers. She followed no school. Each work was a process of building, forming, finding the idea she had in her mind, then bringing it to life. This often involved patient layer upon layer, always seeking a final form that “worked”—colors, shapes, textures, reaching a resonance that sounded when the work was settled. This process often took months, sometimes years. Sometimes, she would return to older canvases to re-work an area with new insight until it was settled. She never felt hurried or rushed to finish a work, and other than when preparing for an art show, there was never a deadline. Always patient but persistent to get it right, the whole canvas… all areas working together as one.
She did have her vivacious Van Gogh moments, bursts of lucid inspiration, wet brush and waiting for white paper or canvas…. and these seemingly simple works still reveal depth of precise command, composition and execution. In this vein, there is a Volcano series of six watercolors that are stroked resolutely and not modeled.
In her 80’s, my mother lived by the ocean in Puako, Hawai‘i. She spent much of her time mentoring and encouraging young artists both in Hawai‘i and on the mainland. She had a garage turned into a storage unit full of all of her finished and unfinished artwork that had not been sold or gifted over the years. One night, a fire broke out, completely destroying the building and most of its contents. That night, my mother watched calmly as the building was engulfed in flames. She only asked those present to hurry to bring bottles of water and some food for all the firefighters. Over the years, a number of those firefighters have remarked about Mom’s kindness at a time when much of life’s work was destroyed.
Much of her art that remains, mostly drawings, is tinged with smoke damage. It is however, a joy to now provide others a glimpse of remaining examples of her various styles and subject matter.
More of her work can be seen here.
To view the entire website on mobile devices, click on the pull-down menu (three lines) in the upper right-hand corner of this page.
