Peggy Watkins is a professional sporting and wildlife artist residing in Atlanta, Georgia. Her representational oil paintings can be found in collections across the country.
Honors include selection as the Featured Artist for the 2008 Southeastern Wildlife Exposition held in Charleston. In 2006 she won the Wildlife Art Magazine Publishers Award as well as an Award of Merit at the “Artists For The New Century” special exhibit held at The Bennington Center for the Arts in Vermont where a piece of her work is now in the museum’s permanent collection. Peggy’s work has also been featured in several publications including Wildlife Art Magazine, Southwest Art Magazine, Sporting Classics, Field Trial Magazine, Shooting Sportsman and Covey Rise.
Peggy has a signature style which she describes as “painterly” realism. It could be said that the actual subjects of her works are the excitement and movement one feels when viewing them. The animal within the paint is almost secondary but serves as the inspiration to put brush to canvas in the first place. Peggy remarks "I especially want to get across the expression of each individual animal versus painting a generic example of a particular species or breed. In this manner I hope I am communicating my idea and striking a chord in others."
Sporting art is the predominant subject matter of Peggy’s work. The interest began in 2003 when she was invited to a plantation in south Georgia to observe the finer points of quail hunting. Amazed at the intelligence and intensity of the bird dogs in action she decided that was something she wanted to capture. Since that first visit, she has spent a majority of time following the dogs in both the south and Texas learning all the fine points of quail habitat and the art of the hunt.
Peggy spends a great deal of time in the field observing and photographing wildlife as well. She and her husband, Todd, own land and a private home in the wild bush country of Zambia which provides ample inspiration for her African work.
Born in Washington State into a Navy family, Peggy began drawing animals at a very young age. Numerous moves across the US as well as Asia allowed her to live in many different environments. Although she originally pursued a career in business, Peggy continually worked on her animal drawings in her spare time and taught herself to be proficient with graphite and colored pencil. She moved into oils after attending classes at the Atlanta College of Art in 2000 and continued her studies through 2004 with artist Kristopher Meadows. However, her greatest inspiration for expressive painting has come from studying the works of some of her favorite artists such as John Singer Sargent, David Shepherd and Richard Schmid.
