On the evening of Friday, November 15, St. Andrew’s students gathered in the Warner Art Gallery for a gallery opening featuring the oil paintings of renowned local artist Lauren Peters. Throughout the evening, about 80 students, dozens of employees, and Peter’s friends and family came to marvel at her portraits, which are bold and vibrant, often featuring brightly colored hair, animal inspiration like snake skin, feathers, and horns, and clothing from flannel to flamboyant. In her artist’s statement, Peters writes, “My practice is an examination of the construction and performance of identity and gender through self-portraiture.” 

Students milled about the gallery and discussed the nuances of different portraits and singled out their favorite pieces. Each portrait is a different interpretation of Peters, but she says she draws inspiration from both fashion and classic works, noting her work “ … springs from a dialogue with the past and present, internal and external influences, a healthy dose of mythology, and the struggle to form a cohesive sense of self.” 

Mythology was one of the inspirations for Peters’ “Amazonian Introvert,” which showcases a Greek design across the border. Classical influence seems to appear in “Woman’s Work” as well; this version of the artist has her wearing a  lion head that appears to draw from Heracles, often featured wearing a cloak made of the slain Nemean lion. A student favorite, “Cut ‘Em Off,” is six feet tall, and features Peters as the Queen of Hearts, wearing a petite golden crown that peeks out of tightly coiled red curls. 

After taking in the work, students gathered around Peters, listening to her tell her artist’s story. “I know it's so easy to get stuck into the details,” Peters told students when asked about the technical side of her process. “That's something I've really had to learn, to develop the backgrounds at the same time as the figures.” 

More than technique though, Peters was able to share her experience about how she came to find art. While Peters was a studio art major in college, it wasn’t until 10 years after college that she took on being an artist full time. Peters says that she originally rented a studio place as a reprieve from a chaotic home, but quickly realized how much she loved painting. 

Following her first show, she was given a grant by the state of Delaware to help her leave her job in the gallery and pursue a career in creating art. “I thought I had landed my dream job working full-time in a full-time gallery.” But, Peters notes, “All I learned from that was seeing other artists [create]. I realized, ‘I want that. I want to be able to do that for myself.’” 

Now she does. “I can't believe I'm doing this earlier than I thought,” she says. “I just thought about [painting] every day when I wasn't painting.”

Joshua Meier, photography and printmaking instructor and director of the Warner Art Gallery, says Peters was an artist on his radar for a couple years. 

“I was drawn to her work for a couple of reasons,” he says “I am really fascinated with the whole self-portraiture genre in art. There's a lot of other artists that I really admire that have worked in that way of using themselves as … this character within their artwork to explore much bigger themes and different things and to communicate those themes.” 

Meier believes that it's important for students to see different kinds of artwork, self portraiture specifically. “Often most people are probably pretty shy about using themselves,” he says. 

Peters is one of three artists slated to install their work in the gallery this school year; others include Brandan Henry in the winter and Gregg Deal in the spring. Meier says having artists exhibit in the Warner gallery adds to the holistic education St. Andrew’s seeks to provide. 

“It falls in line with what we try to do as a school,” Meier says. “If you look at all the different types of people we bring to the school to do lectures or to visit classrooms, like authors and politicians and scientists, [we can] present ideas from different perspectives and expose our community to different ways of thinking.” 

Meier sees these art exhibitions as “an exchange of ideas” that offers students the opportunity to wrestle with the stories that the artists are trying to tell, which ties into how Peters interprets the message of her own work: “They’re all telling the story of how complex it is to be a human being.”