Colin S. MacDonald, “A Dictionary of Canadian Artists, Volume 4”, Ottawa, 1977, page 1068
In 1937, at age thirty-three, Pegi Nicol married Norman MacLeod, a native of Fredericton. The couple moved to New York City the same year when her husband accepted a position at a contracting and engineering firm. The bustling street life of the big city provided a never-ending source of inspiration for the artist, who had previously been painting schoolchildren and the Canadian landscape. MacLeod's work of the 1930s had already begun to show a more expressive style, experimenting with repetitive views. She applied this method, which she called "kaleidoscope vision," to her images of urban life, such as “Construction on E. 88th Street, NYC”. Author Donald W. Buchanan remarked on MacLeod's work of this period in New York, writing that “she tried to put down on canvas and paper every aspect of the chaotic bustle that met her eyes from her windows on Eighty-Eighth Street; she wished to leave nothing out. As a result, in many of those pictures, the surface overflows with figures in motion, it is packed with now sinuous and graceful, now wavering and erratic, lines and shapes.”
Pegi Nicol MacLeod - Construction on E. 88th Street, NYC | Cowley Abbott
