Peregrine Honig’s art show Player is her most personal artistic endeavor yet

Points and Thorns // Peregrine Honig

Peregrine Honig has worn a lot of hats over the years, from being the artistic director of the West 18th Street Fashion Show for 20 years, to co-owning Birdies lingerie, to writing the film Summer in Hindsight—the list goes on. Growing up in San Francisco, she’s been an artist from the age of three, and she ended up in Kansas City to attend the Kansas City Art Institute. Though she’s been all over the country, she’s stuck around KC.

“I love the power of Kansas City,” Honig says. “I really love that you can get a lot done, that it’s not drained, that you don’t have to have a lot of money to ask for money. People are very excited to work with artists and do things for artists.”

She’s generally had a solo artist exhibition every few years, and this upcoming one, Player, is her most personal project so far.

“It’s my most emotional body of work to date for sure,” says Honig. “It’s not coquettish. I’m not looking over my shoulder—I’m looking directly in the face of the person who’s looking at it.”

Player consists of seven 6×9 foot oil paintings that portray life-size fairytale and mythical characters framed by pigment-layered backgrounds to create the appearance of theatrical sets. The characters depicted in the paintings and the audience are players being played, hence the title of the exhibition. 

Though the paintings all hold up on their own, together they tell a story. Each painting is an anecdote of Honig’s life, but like all art, they’re open to interpretation.

“The thing that’s amazing about paintings, about art in general, is it becomes like a movie screen, because whatever is inside of you is going to get projected onto what you’re seeing,” says Honig.

Though the collection has been in residence for two years, the conceptualization of it began roughly 20 years ago, when Honig was working on Father Gander, a set of six lithographs based on childhood fairytales. Some of the same shapes and themes can be seen in both Father Gander and Player, with the most notable similarity being the Red Riding Hood and the Wolf theme. 

Mother Hood // Peregrine Honig

“I never have been interested in black and white conversations,” says Honig. “I’ve always been interested in the gray area. I’m interested in the idea of Red Riding Hood having an affair with the wolf. Generally, people are told to marry the woodsman.”

Father Gander features a lithograph of Red Riding Hood being unhappy in her marriage to the woodsman from the story. A similar image is depicted within Player, and “WOLF” can be seen painted in the final image in the set—an image that seems to resemble a dark tunnel, but represents something of a “rebirth,” bringing the story represented in the paintings full circle.

Wolf // Peregrine Honig

Honig officially started on Player in 2021, when she received the The Studios Inc Studio Exchange. She collaborated with house painter Rachel Loomis to figure out the colors she’d use, and they sat down with two different palettes before choosing and making the colors that would be used in Player. 

Honig made a cardboard stencil so that she could trace out the shapes from Father Gander onto the canvases. After filling in the shapes with a white oil pigment, she invited some friends into the studio to help her trace over the shapes in burnt umber to give her something to work against before she added more color. Despite the many hours put into the paintings since then, you can still see those colors if you look closely. 

About a year ago, she met with painter Marcus Cain to look at the paintings. At this point, Honig felt like the paintings were starting to look the same, and Cain advised her to delineate the characters further to make them feel more different. Honig took this advice to heart, and got to work on doing exactly that—which shows in the final product. Using oil paint proved to be beneficial here because while it sets, it never fully dries, which makes it easy to modify. However, the last two years of work—with some paintings having at least 70 hours put into them—has been quite the process, entailing a great deal of trial and error at times.

“They have not been easy,” says Honig of her paintings. “They have been resistant. They have been deceptive. The one of the boat, if you go and see the layers of that piece, I nearly gave up on that one at one point because it had come to me so quickly—the hands, the feet, and then everything else kept falling apart.”

Custody // Peregrine Honig

The painting in question is rather fascinating, presenting the most unique character in the set. Honig talks about how much she enjoys painting hands and the amount of care that has to go into that process to get the hands to look right—which is interesting, considering that many artists would say that painting or drawing hands is the bane of their existence—but this influenced her choice to paint the character’s feet as hands.

Throughout the process, Honig had many people in and out of the studio to assist her and provide feedback on the paintings.

“Having people at different stages, from different parts of the world giving me insight—it’s just been really awesome,” says Honig.

Much of the work is about the cost of being a woman, inspired by Honig’s own struggles with fertility, which can be seen in a painting of a woman with a baby and a painting of a woman with two dead children.

Memento // Peregrine Honig

“I know that I’m not necessarily painting something that everyone wants to live with or put over their couch,” Honig says. “But that’s not why I was put here.”

Honig will be both sad and happy to see the paintings go once the exhibition is over, given the emotional journey that creating Player has been. 

Player opens to the public at the Studios Inc Exhibit Hall this Friday, Nov. 17. There will be a Board & Collectors preview at 5:30 p.m. and the show that will be open to the public takes place from 6:30 p.m. to 9 p.m. Admission is free, but reservations are encouraged.

There will also be a reception where the understudies can be viewed at Blue Gallery from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m., and an afterparty at The Ship from 9 p.m. to 11 p.m. 

Player will be on display at Studios Inc until Dec. 23, and more information can be found on the Studios Inc webpage.