Consider Plot Twist, the first painting in Gina Pfleegor’s online gallery of work: a young girl in a fancy gown sits at a table. Before her is a plain china plate holding a tiny crown. Frog legs hang from between the girl’s pursed lips. The girl looks resolute, even slightly annoyed. Perhaps this is because the model, Gina’s daughter, Emma, then fourteen, had to pose for some time in a fancy dress holding baby carrots (frog leg surrogates) in her mouth. Despite a trip to Starbucks, Emma’s usual “payment” for modeling for her mother, Emma afterwards remarked dryly that she greatly prefers not having props in her mouth.

The painting won the Four Columns prize from the Arnot Art Museum at its regional show, and it’s one of two times (so far) Gina has attained it. When Plot Twist was exhibited at the West End Gallery in Corning, owner/director Jesse Gardner bought it. “I almost have a shrine to it at home,” Jesse says. “It means a lot on so many different levels. Her artwork is powerful. She has a lot to say.”

Fun, fantasy, and empowerment are central to Gina’s paintings. Clearly the work of someone who loves what she does, her work invites the observer into an often-surreal universe that somehow makes perfect sense. Find that universe at the West End Gallery (12 West Market Street, Corning) during its Spotlight show featuring Gina, Trish Coonrod, a still life painter, and Bruce Baxter, an interpretive, Impressionistic-style painter, three treasured artists with very different techniques. The show opens September 5 and will run through October 9. Each of the artists will come in to do a live painting demonstration during the show (dates and times to be announced on the gallery’s website, westendgallery.net).

“It’s a good opportunity to meet the artist if you haven’t already met them,” Jesse says. “And to get a better understanding of the creative process. It’s not just oil paint and canvas, it’s the decades of experience the artists have learned from.”

Control This!

Gina has always expressed herself via drawing and painting, devoting hours at a time to art even before she could read. “If you’re interested, you do it more often. I did it all the time. It might take a certain level of natural ability, but there’s a lot that can be learned.” There’s a smile in her voice whenever she talks about her art.

Her first teacher was her mother, a landscape painter who taught Gina to work in watercolors, convinced the oils and the solvents involved in using oil paints gave off fumes too toxic for a young person. Her great-grandmother was also a watercolorist.

In college—she attended SUNY at Fredonia—Gina majored in drawing, but admits, “I hated painting with a passion.” When she tried, her professors told her she had to “loosen up” and criticized her work as being too controlled, too “tight.” “I hated loosening up,” she says now. “I didn’t want to do that, and now I’ve found success at what they told me not to do.”

After Gina began teaching art in the Hammondsport School District in 2001, where she’s spent her entire teaching career, she began sending her resumé to children’s book publishers. At the time she thought she might want to write a children’s book, and this was her way of testing the waters. The powers-that-be loved her drawings but asked her to instead paint the illustrations they needed. Could she paint as well? “Of course,” Gina answered them, thinking, I’m going to learn [oil painting] right now!

Luckily, the East Corning artist had resources nearby. “It’s such a strong arts community,” she says. “It’s a great place for artists to live. We have so many different kinds of arts and artists in this area.”

As a mostly self-taught painter, she took a class at 171 Cedar Arts Center with Dustin Boutwell, who teaches oil painting and was the 2015 and 2019 recipient of the center’s Bob Kinner Faculty Award for Teaching Excellence, to confirm she knew the techniques. By then the composition of oil paints had changed, and the solvents had become virtually odorless. Over the course of five years, she illustrated ten children’s books, beginning with I Like Gum, by Doreen Tango Hampton (Shenanigan Books, 2007).

Book illustration revealed an enjoyment of painting faces, and she turned from illustration to more portraiture. The birth of her daughter, Emma, gave her a perfect model. But her home and studio were soon burgeoning with paintings she couldn’t bear to sell. Instead, she painted photorealistic still lifes, sometimes larger than life and “detailed to a T,” as Jesse says.

“Her talent was always evident. Then five or six years ago she started to do something different, a pop-surrealism,” she continues. “We could just see when she did this shift, she blossomed and found her voice as an artist. We could see that she had tapped into something, something she’d been looking for, for years. And when she found her artistic voice, the voice was beautiful.”

The term pop-surrealism is often applied to images painted in a flat, graphic style. But Gina’s brand is seasoned with the depth, skill, and precision of classic, Old Masters paintings. “Combining the photorealistic style with a surrealistic look reflective of my days doing illustration gives me the best of both worlds,” Gina says.

“She puts her thumbprint on it, makes it hers,” Jesse says of Gina’s unique style. “When you see one of her paintings, you know it’s a Gina Pfleegor.”

Changing her style “from hyperreal to surreal means I can change things or alter how old she is,” Gina explains. The characters in her paintings range from young girls to young adults, their faces reflecting a variety of moods, hair, eyes, costume, and expression. Surrealism also offers an opportunity to use the elements in a painting to tell more of a story, both an overt one and one more subtle for the viewer who spends a little time with it. It also allows Gina to concentrate on subtleties like the quality of light.

Artistic Determination

As she notes in her artist’s statement, “In my more recent series of paintings, I found myself drawn to a subject I know well, that balance of feeling strong yet feminine as a woman in our society today. Attempting to depict a sense of authenticity regarding what this can often feel like, I use symbolism to show that we can be both without sacrificing the other. Sensual can be strong, determined can be vulnerable, and sometimes warriors wear gowns into battle.”

Gina, too, wears determination. She’s always painted several hours a day when she isn’t teaching. She keeps an easel at the back of her classroom for non-teaching downtimes.

She says it’s good for her students to see work in progress and to learn about what goes into creating a painting. She teaches kids in grades eight through twelve; in recent years she’s found herself teaching students whose parents were in her classroom during her initial years as an instructor. One of her early students even went on to teach art in another nearby district. Her pupils have been among those who have encouraged her to enter her paintings in contests, both local and worldwide. And they’ve cheered for her when she won prizes and recognition.

In her classroom, students can watch her work, learn how she applies a technique she’s discussed with them, and ask questions. “They can see I’m right there with them in the trenches of doing these things,” Gina says. When asked whether she has a favorite, she laughs, “They’re all my favorite student!”

Her home studio is a tidy, minimalistic, quiet space where she can work for longer stretches of time. No wild creative messes to be found here. The walls and floors are neutral beige, the paints and materials, costumes and props are tucked neatly away when they’re not in use. On one side of the room, there’s a photo setup where Emma sometimes poses in costumes gleaned from a Salvation Army thrift store. Mother and daughter work mostly harmoniously, though Emma’s been heard to mutter, “How long is this going to take? Please tell me I don’t have to do an outfit change.”

Gina calls Emma her muse and says she instinctively adjusts her head and body into the look Gina’s hoping for. Their mother-daughter collaboration seems intuitive. “She knows the look I want, the angle I want. I know she’ll get it,” Gina says, adding with a sigh that she’s not quite sure what she’ll do after this year when Emma graduates from high school and goes on to college.

From Emma’s point of view, “It’s not too complicated,” she says. “She [her mother] usually has a pretty good idea of what she wants me to do, and I’ve gotten used to it.” Gina’s instructions for posing tend to be subtle, like, “This is the vibe,” Emma reports. “There was one she did of me as a mermaid. That one was really cool. But it was less in the posing and more like she turned me into a mermaid.”

Her current favorite painting is one she recently posed for. Ruffled features a young woman and a raven, which was on the easel when I visited. “I don't know if I have a super-metaphorical reason [for liking the painting], ” Emma says. “I just like ravens.”

The Process and the Product

After photos are taken, Gina works from those. Even then, there can be frustrations. Occasionally, if Gina feels a painting-in-progress on the easel diverges too sharply from the plan she had in mind—and interestingly, Gina comes up with the title for a painting long before the first paint is squeezed onto her palette—she’ll ruthlessly return the offending part to white and start over. When she wasn’t satisfied with the expression on the young woman’s face in Ruffled as she first portrayed it, she painted over it and began again. That kind of exactitude can mean redoing many days of work. When looking closely at her finished pieces, the complexity in layers of color and shape are evident.

Gina’s art is, in fact, meant for close perusal. Consider All the King’s Horses in the soon-to-open Spotlight show and you’ll see those horses quietly cavorting in the background, barely visible beneath the gold-dusted patina, a small distraction from the girl seen in the central space of a cracked egg. Or another where butterflies flood into flight through the door a young child has casually opened in her midsection. Or the bees flying in the background of Don’t Call Me Honey, a depiction of a sharp-shouldered young woman warrior resolutely holding a sword.

“I definitely have a general theme of…I don’t want to say women’s empowerment or women’s experiences—that’s not what I thought of setting out to do but it sort of evolved,” she says. “It comes up again and again, the balance of femininity and strength.”

While Gina admits to consciously adding symbolic elements to her work, and being gratified when a viewer, reviewer, or purchaser recognizes them—“Cool, they got that!”—she can also be astonished when someone draws a new meaning from a painting. For instance, the purchaser of an earlier painting of a woman blowing dust that transforms into birds winging away was captured by the visual representation of her grown children who had left the nest to embark on lives of their own.

Her work has earned notable awards. In addition to the Four Columns prizes, she was also a finalist in the international Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize, an annual prize competition that celebrates diversity and excellence in the representational visual arts.

Rick Pirozzolo, director of the Arnot Art Museum, says “One can always see Gina’s clever eye and precise hand in her painting. Her work is arresting, be it in the witty wink of Plot Twist [Four Columns prizewinner in 2023] or the arresting precision of Within Your Reach [winner of the 2016 Four Columns prize]. She’s a boss of creativity and talent.”

Looking Forward

Gina’s been offered more opportunities for exhibits and shows, but these need to wait until she retires from teaching, a bittersweet milestone currently five years away. “This is the last group of eighth graders I’ll follow through to graduation,” Gina says wistfully.

But she’s looking forward to painting fulltime and continuing to evolve as an artist. Which also means the evolution is an on-going process. With Emma’s graduation next year, she won’t be around as much to model for her mother. It’s possible, then, that Gina’s future art may move in an as-yet-unknown direction. For those captivated now by her paintings and the way they encourage the viewer pause and consider, the direction promises to be an unexpected and intriguing adventure.

“There’s something about her work, a very distinct style and flavor,” says Jesse. “All her paintings are a story, they have deep meaning, sometimes it’s subtle, sometimes it’s very apparent. There’s something more going on there, something symbolic. It was just beautiful to watch her when she discovered that. I could even see an extra sparkle in her eyes.”