Botanical beauty
Rural Mid-Missouri artist Peggy Guest packs up 'wild' flower works for New York show.

Looking at the whimsical, fantastical works Peggy Guest produces, one probably wouldn’t guess she got her start doing no-nonsense illustrations for the military.

After studying art at Park College in north Kansas City, Guest worked from 1972 to 1984 as an artist for the Army and Air Force. From airplane engines to medical equipment to foreign terrain, Guest created a variety of illustrations and three-dimensional models on demand.

"It was production art," she said. "You didn’t draw because you felt like it or because the mood strikes you. You had to draw because they need it - now."

During those years, Guest found herself winding down from the day by sketching. But instead of putting utilitarian objects to paper, she drew unusual animals culled from her imagination.

"It was a nice release," she said. "I felt like I had to do something that used my creativity."

As her portfolio of invented animals grew, Guest began showing her work in sidewalk art shows in Kansas City. To her surprise, some of her pieces sold.

These days, Guest spends most of her days creating art inspired by her inner world from her home in rural Howard County.

She keeps a low profile, but her work is on display throughout Mid-Missouri. She completed a mural at the north end of Main Street in Boonville that depicts the city’s past. She has a wood sculpture in Columbia’s Roger B. Wilson Boone County Government Center, and she’s done murals for Boone Hospital Center and Columbia’s Ronald McDonald House.

This month, Guest and her husband, Joe, will pack up their van with her work and head to New York for a show at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.

The exhibit - called "Wild Flowers!" - will feature 50 of Guest’s paintings and four sculptures. It will run Aug. 15 through Sept. 12.

Each piece that will be in the show depicts a type of plant. For example, one painting shows lions in repose, examining themselves with hand mirrors. The piece is called "Dandelions."

Another shows a stately woman surrounded by white wildflowers in a forest. Another visual pun, it is named "Queen Anne’s Lace," which refers to both the woman and the wildflowers known by the same name.

Guest is a prolific artist. She works on a painting or sculpture almost every day. Since February, she said, she has completed 27 paintings for the New York show.

"I think that comes from all the discipline you have to have working for the military," she said. "I produce every day, and I think that makes you better. You have to practice to get better."

Although creating art comes easily to her, she’s had more difficulty navigating the business end of being an artist - selling herself to collectors and gallery curators.

As someone bashful about her talent, Guest said, it took 15 years of painting before she would even sign her own works.

She said friends such as Joe Geist, who is curator of the Ashby-Hodge Gallery of American Art on the Central Methodist University campus in Fayette, have helped her gain confidence in her work and momentum in the art world.

"What she does is blend the folk tale and the fairy tale with the modern imagination," said Geist, who intends to see Guest’s show in New York.

Geist said he hopes the show will lead to bigger things for Guest. The museum expects some 70,000 people to pass through its doors while "Wild Flowers!" is on display.

"I think it will be very good for her in terms of getting a wider market and a wider appreciation of her work," he said.

Fayette artist Thomas Yancey, who plans to travel to the show with Geist, met Guest several years ago when they each had winning entries in the Columbia Art League’s annual "Whimsy" show.

"I was bowled over by her work," he said. "You can’t help but be drawn into her world of imagination."

One of his favorite Guest pieces is "The Flying Squirrel." The three-dimensional piece shows a squirrel riding what appears to be a flying bicycle. The squirrel, dressed in a scarf, corduroy pants and tennis shoes, is pushing a cart full of flowers.

"One word I use to describe her is ‘fearless.’ She does murals, sculptures, paintings - she’ll take on anything," Yancey said of Guest.

Though Guest wouldn’t use that word to describe herself, she said working on large-scale projects isn’t without peril.

While working on the Boonville mural, she often was perched on scaffolding 30 feet in the air. On one afternoon, she said, two men wandered out from a nearby bar and asked her to have a drink with them.

"When I said, ‘No,’ they kicked the brakes off," she said.

Guest could feel the platform begin to sway and quickly agreed to the drink.

When the men secured the platform, Guest slunk back down to the river bottom. Once on solid ground, she handed each man a dollar and said, "You go ahead without me."

Guest’s husband is an essential partner in all her work. Joe Guest works in construction and helps his wife by constructing platforms for her sculptures and frames for her paintings. He also uses his handy know-how for finishing touches, such as the functioning lights on her flying squirrel’s flower cart.

Guest said her next project will be a series of interactive pieces that incorporate levers and dials that can be investigated by the viewer. On a recent morning, she was sketching a piece in which a wheel could be turned to sprout up flowers.

She intends to call the series "mechanical botanicals."

"I’ve always been fascinated by automatons," she said. "I couldn’t do this without Joe. I’m the idea person, and Joe helps me do it."

Elements of nature run throughout Guest’s work, and the theme is not incidental.

"I don’t think nature ever gets old," she said. "Trends in modern art come and go, but I don’t think people will ever turn away from the simplicity of growing grass or a beautiful day. It’s something everyone has direct experience with."

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Reach Liz Heitzman at (573) 815-1715 or lheitzman@tribmail.com.

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