Written by Janet Villa
The word inspire comes from the Latin inspirare, which means “to be breathed into by a divine being,” perhaps an offshoot of how the Lord breathed the breath of life into Adam’s nostrils. And what was designed from dust became a living soul, the climax of God’s creative work.
Pinky Peralta’s second solo exhibit—titled “Breath”—is inspired in the same way. Her latest works in watercolor and oil accomplish what art does and what the Lord desires: lift the mundane to the sublime. In no other time is this artistry more compelling than today when the world feels abbreviated.
Pinky’s art asks us to experience catharsis in the ordinary. With our life’s radius severely truncated these days, she invites us to revisit the resplendence immediately before us: a banana trunk bursting in colorful vigor; the patterns of bark measuring the tints of time; or the crust of the eucalyptus tree peeling off in hues. Like the prophet Isaiah, the farmer and artist in Pinky sees the whole earth “full of His glory.”
Pinky’s work adopts the pace and flow of the nature that she depicts: effortless, fluent, graceful. That beauty is all around us—her art seems to say—not just in the dama de noche or in the water lilies, but just as much in the daily brew of coffee, in the pyramid of pots and pans, or in a bike leaning on the wall.
Just when many are straining against today’s forced isolation, Pinky’s art summons us to instead settle into a quietude and create another space for the irresistibility of storm clouds assailing sunsets or for the loneliness of dusty roads. We see how, in the words of Gerald Manley Hopkins, “the world is charged with the grandeur of God.” This is Pinky’s kind of worship: in seeing “a heaven in a wild flower,” we find the holy in the humdrum.
