"Pegi Nicol MacLeod" from
Uninvited: Canadian Women Artists in the Modern Moment

In celebration of Pegi Nicol MacLeod's birthday on January 17, we'd like to highlight an excerpt from Georgiana Uhlyarik's essay on the beloved artist, featured in the McMichael's Uninvited: Canadian Women Artists in the Modern Moment: 

When she was about twenty-five, Pegi Nicol painted a double-sided portrait of herself holding a potted pink cyclamen in full bloom. She exhibited it, for sale, as The Slough in 1929 and again in 1932. The rougher finish of the composition on the verso side of the wood panel is repeated, refined, and signed on the recto….  Nicol's signed painting is a restrained rhapsody in teal, brown, and pink. The teal blue of her eyes is the same as her jacket; her brown hair is reflected in the colour of the potted earth; the pink of her cheeks echoes the cyclamen petals. She painted herself as if petalled. Her head and torso fill the left half of the composition, while the plant propped up in her hands occupies more than the bottom half, leaving the top right corner as a silent foil to the noisy rhythms of the rest of the painting….  

Unlike a bouquet, the cyclamen plant is alive. With care it will blossom again each year, especially in the winter months. The most unconventional detail in Nicol's composition is that she holds the pot in her hand, a gesture of deliberate presentation. This is atypical in portraits with flowers, as in most either the figure holds cut (dying) flowers or the potted plant is placed nearby. In Nicol's remarkable choice to so actively present the pot and the vigorously blossoming plant, the cyclamen becomes an extension of herself.  

In this work, Nicol performs repeated acts of doubling. First, she chooses herself as the subject of pictorial inquiry and extends her own image in relationship with a common and beloved flower. Second, she paints it twice, on both sides of the panel, refining her self-representation and fine-tuning her mood. (Often struggling financially, Nicol regularly painted on both sides of her support, but The Slough is two versions of the same composition. The panel was split by a collector in the 1990s, producing two works. They are now in separate private collections.)  Each version is visible by concealing the other. Finally, the cyclamen flower itself is inside out, at once both fully exposed and hidden.