Kristen Peyton

Kristen Peyton is a painter, printmaker, and draftsman working from observation and invention. She earned a Masters of Fine Art in Painting from the University of New Hampshire in 2017 and a Bachelor of Arts from the College of William and Mary in 2012. Kristen is a native of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and a resident of Richmond, Virginia. She is the Director and Curator of the Flippo Gallery at Randolph-Macon College as well as an instructor of drawing at Randolph-Macon and the College of William and Mary. 

Kristen’s work is a gesture of hospitality—an invitation to marvel at the mystery and beauty of commonplace moments encountered in everyday life. She welcomes her viewers into the profound presence of a chosen moment by offering through her work the gift of “eternal timefullness.” Artist and writer Makoto Fujimura speaks of “eternal timefullness” in his book Refractions as such, “A timeful experience is given when our minds are allowed to fully respond to the senses… It’s what William Blake, the eighteenth-century poet, meant when he wrote, ‘To see a world in a grain of sand, / And a heaven in a wild flower, / Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, / And eternity in an hour.’ Art is a gift I offer in faith to others—an attentive lens given to my viewer of captured light, time, and space. It is my invitation to the viewer to pause, to enter fully the created space of my paintings, stay awhile, and experience the visual abundance of our world.