Christopher Atamian
NEW YORK — Writer, photographer and color field painter Peggy Hinaekian is 89 years old and shows no signs of slowing down. In fact the more time goes by, the more successful projects she seems to undertake.
The Egyptian-born polymath is an inspirational whirlwind of activity. Raised in Cairo where a prosperous Armenian community once lived, Hinaekian’s paternal step-grandfather, Karekin Durgherian, owned the largest private library in Egypt. As a result, she grew up surrounded by books in a multilingual household where she learned English, French, Arabic and Armenian at a young age.
“My father was a Renaissance man and a fatalist,” explained Hinaekian. “During WWII in Cairo, when the sirens would blast, we would all go down to the doorkeeper’s living quarters in a semi-basement. My father, however, stayed behind and would declare that he preferred dying in his bed if a bomb fell on the building.”
After leaving Cairo, Hinaekian spent years honing her craft as an artist at leading institutions such as the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and the Leonardo da Vinci Academy of Art in Rome. She also studied Art History at McGill University and etching at the Institute of Contemporary Prints in Geneva, Switzerland. Then ensued a career as a fashion designer in Boston and Manhattan before she decided to pursue art as a profession.
Inspired by Matisse, Modigliani and Picasso, she began creating paintings based on “the couples theme” as she terms it, and solitary women posed in different positions and painted in vivid colors. Since then, she has been creating vibrant abstract landscapes in blue and earth tones, as well as collages on paper in rich reds, blues and blacks.
While becoming an accomplished painter, Hinaekian also published her first book, an erotic romance novel titled Of Julia and Men in 2018, which explores the latent sexual tension between the opposite sexes.
Then in 2020, she came out with an autobiographical memoir titled The Girl from Cairo, which traces the author’s early life in the Egyptian capital through WWII, followed by her cosmopolitan existence in Montreal, Boston and New York City in the 1950s and early 1960s. This fast-paced work takes the reader through two Middle Eastern wars and the mind of a young woman who escapes age-old cultural stereotypes to gain the freedom to live as an emancipated woman. At the beginning of the book, Hinaekian describes her desire to recapture her lost youth, though she realizes that this is a vain attempt: “But alas, nothing can be recaptured.”
Hinaekian’s writing style is spare and to the point, and her narrator shoots from the hip, as when she writes: “I knew that life was full of surprises, and I could not predict the future. I was just damn curious to find out what was in store for me on the other side of the Atlantic.”
Hinaekian’s writing has been featured in the New York Times and in 2020 she received a literary award from the Writer’s Workshop in Asheville, NC.
Of all of Hinaekian’s different activities artistic and literary, I am perhaps most taken by her rich color field paintings. In the large 44” by 24” acrylic-on-canvas “Spring Green” (2023) the artist pairs an almost rust green with a deep Chinese red that play off each other in a rich yin and yang of abstraction. The top green part of the diptych and the bottom red flow into each other like waves and intersect with elemental force.
Other works display both whimsy and craft, such as her 2024 “Bluebirds Flying Through.” Set against a bright orange and yellow canvas reminiscent of a setting sun, two bluebirds sit on a thread that resembles the tail of a kite before flying off through a painted rectangular tear in the canvas. On the edge of the red tear, dots of blue hint at more bluebirds on a journey somewhere else, reminiscent perhaps of the Judy Garland song Over the Rainbow.
“Blue Birds Flying through” by Peggy Hinaekian
A typical canvas can take Hinaekian up to two weeks to complete. The painter succinctly explained her process for making these colorful works: “Rothko most influenced my color field paintings. I paint differently than he does, though. I first put a layer of gesso mixed with some paint thickener, then I lay down a color that I would like to appear in the final product. I then lay on other colors on top of that to create a multi-surfaced final painting.”
Other canvases hue more closely to a classic color field, such as one large, also rectangular-sized, canvas with orange rectangles painted over a red background or another almost entirely blue canvas with at least four or five shades of blue from light aquamarine to deep almost blue black, which recalls ocean waves against sand and the sky falling from above.
As Hinaekian writes: “I’m fascinated by the warm earth tones of desert landscapes and the cool blue hues of the oceans. My colors evoke the Egyptian landscape — the Sinai desert’s quality of orange light and the turquoise blue of the Mediterranean Sea. These left an indelible impression on me and have influenced the entire corpus of my work.”
“Spring Green” (Diptych), acrylic on canvas, 22 X 44.
As she has explained elsewhere, Hinaekian starts off with a general idea but then lets chance play its role in her creative process, as opposed to some artists who work with exact specifications ahead of time and know what a final canvas will look like before they set out to paint it: “I rarely work with a preconceived vision for the final product. I allow for the possibility of ambiguity and surprise, as I try to immerse the viewer in a perceptual experience of space, color and light.” The experience that the artist tries to create for viewers is deeply sensual as she almost physically guides them into the paintings, so they may “wander off into a different reality.”
Currently Hinaekian is exhibiting at the San Diego Water Color Society in Pacific Beach, Calif., through March and at the North Coastal Art Gallery in Carlsbad, Calif., through the end of 2025. Art lovers may also take in her work at venues as diverse as the Contemporary Fine Arts Gallery in La Jolla, Calif., the M. A. Doran Art Gallery in Tulsa, Ok, and at San Diego’s MOPA/SDMA Museum. The artist splits her time between California and Switzerland, where her work can also be found at the Carouge Art Museum, the Contemporary Print Museum of Geneva and the Canton of Geneva Art Collection. Hinaekian enjoys sharing her thoughts on life, and art and holds a monthly salon at her La Jolla studio, which has become a tradition amongst locals.
Out of Egypt a young Armenian woman once emerged to conquer the world — and after much hard work and determination, she has seemingly done just that. Her motto has always been: “Don’t dream your life, live your dreams.”
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