Statement

Peggy Herrick is a painter, writer, bookmaker, and a devoted illustrated journal keeper. She holds degrees in biology, art, and religion, and has been a professional artist since 1969, first as a medical illustrator working in New York and Philadelphia and later making fine art. For the past 30 years, she has been creating illustrated travel journals that she calls “journey daybooks” during travels in Europe, Canada, Cuba, South America and throughout the United States. To share the practice with others, she has facilitated teaching retreats, including with groups of women inmates at a Florida maximum security prison. She explains: “Through the journey daybook process, I learn about myself and my place as a human and a woman in my environment.” 

During the pandemic, Peggy moved from her historic home on an island off the northern Florida Gulf coast to Albuquerque to be closer to her family. Since that time, Peggy’s journey daybook work has continued. In lockdown, she joined a Zoom figure painting group based in New Orleans where she still continues to paint the figure weekly. Over the past 3 years, she has adapted her practice of plein air painting to the dry western environment, exploring both central New Mexico and traveling to other western states. In the past 2 years, she is fortunate to have had her journey daybook pages exhibited in juried exhibitions both here and in New Orleans. She is very grateful to her many new friends in the Albuquerque art community for the kindness and friendship they have given her since she settled into her little Nob Hill home three years ago.