ABSTRACT
On June 5, 2015, I met with costume painter Margaret Peot at New York City’s Cornelia Street Café; she had suggested the location because it is an easy commute from the Parsons-Meares costume shop in Long Island City. It has also been a favorite haunt of Peot’s since she arrived in the city in 1986, and the owner (now a friend), Robin Hirsch, had previously hosted a group show at the location called the “Art of Costume Painting.” The café’s walls featured a series of painted samples from the work of Parsons-Meares’s painters, including Peot, Welles-Tolkan, Virginia Clow, Claudia Dzundza, and Mary Macy. The challenge of costume painting, according to the “brief history” written by Welles-Tolkan and Peot to accompany the samples, “is finding the method and paint medium that satisfied the designer’s vision and withstands the rigors of eight shows a week for a lengthy run … From the designer’s concept, to what one ultimately sees on the stage, costume painting is often the most elegant solution” to helping the designer “fully realize the costume he or she drew.” 1 Once we ordered lunch, Peot handed me a copy of her book Stencil Craft (2015), a how-to manual that demonstrates for the layperson some of the fabric painting techniques she has perfected during the more than twenty-five years she has worked at Parsons-Mears.
