The love of painting in the open air together with the love of old architecture often lead me to the grounds of abandoned structures. If a place is not routinely used, I can set up my easel and work there without being in anyone's domain. Although pursuing the impressionist's method of open air painting in our "shrinking" world is challenging, the hunt for free ground is highly motivating, even primal. I am further motivated by the passing beauty when an old building, resonant with past lives, is falling or is to be torn down.

Jacksonian Apartments

Peggy Snow is an artist and music-maker who pursues an open air method of painting the landscape, people, relics, ruins, and abandoned structures where they stand. The attention the middle Tennessee media has given her while she studied such architecture as the Father Ryan High School, the Union Station Train Shed, and the Jacksonian Apartment Building has won her a reputation for documenting, through art, the passing of historic architecture. The Tennessee State Museum purchased her 1991 Union Station Train Shed painting for its 20th century collection of art. Her first painting of the Jacksonian Apartments is owned by and displayed at Tin Angel Restaurant on West End Avenue in Nashville. Mayor Bill Purcell relayed to the artist in a 1999 letter, "I appreciate your efforts in documenting some of our city's lost, and endangered, treasures." As well as in the State Museum, her work is in numerous private collections.

Snow began oil painting at the age of nine in a neighborhood summer art class in Memphis, Tennessee. She now holds a B.A. in Art and English from Belmont College, and maintains a studio in that Nashville neighborhood. She teaches periodically at Cheekwood's Frist Learning Center, where she exhibited her paintings in the winter of 2000.

She was awarded a solo exhibit in 1999 at the Vanderbilt Women's Center, where she featured her portrait work. Snow has exhibited her work widely in Tennessee, as well as in Germany and Montana. The University of Montana at Missoula awarded Snow a fellowship for outstanding incoming graduate students in 1991, where she studied for a year. Her work has been awarded in both regional and national juried exhibitions.

Some of Snow's greatest influences which can be seen in her work are the styles of Van Gogh and of the German Expressionists. Snow recently traveled to Germany where she re-learned the language, made paintings of the ancient architecture, and played music with street musicians.