Faces and Spaces: Mary Penckofer
Until her friends said something Mary Penckofer was convinced that her orange sofa was bright red. After looking at only three of Penckofer’s pieces and noticing she consistently worked with certain colors, her art professor guessed that she was colorblind. She was right-- Penckofer has mild enchroma, and her perception of color has become part of her identity as an artist. Penckofer is a senior at Northwestern studying neuroscience, but she was previously an art major. Art remains an important part of her life, and it has been since she was a little girl. Penckofer works with intense colors and high contrast.
Penckofer grew up going to the Art Institute of Chicago a few times a week with her father, who is also an artist . As a photographer, he has a darkroom in the basement of their home, which provoked Pencokfer’s fascination with high contrast. She started painting with him as a little girl, and it wasn’t until she was nine or ten that she figured out she was colorblind.
“I guess it didn’t really affect me because I already loved art,” Penckofer says. “I figured out how to work with [color blindness] without realizing I was working with it.”
Penckofer spent years walking through museums with her father and talking about what they admired. She had no idea that she was perceiving different colors than he was. Her color blindness is subtle, with reds and greens and certain other shades that appear close to each other on the color wheel obscured. The normal eye has three color cones: red, blue and green. Red-green colorblind people like Penckofer cannot clearly tell the difference between the two wavelengths. However, her idea of color is part of her style, and she isn’t shy to show it.
“I definitely don’t think about what it would look like to other people,” Penckofer says.
She believes that color blindness neither positively or negatively affects her work. Color blindness has impacted her vision for her entire life, so it simply complements her sight. In sixth or seventh grade, her dad bought her a neon hot pink tube of paint which she instantly adored. That’s when she started experimenting with bright colors, and the habit has stuck with her since. Ironically, color blindness may be why she gravitates to extremely vibrant hues. She has noticed that she definitely sticks to specific color palettes. Penckofer paints with purples, blues, pinks and yellows because those colors are vividly stand out to her. Most times, she doesn’t paint with realistic colors, which helps her avoid having to color match with certain hues she can’t differentiate.
“I use really intense neon paints,” Penckofer says. “ I don’t use natural colors at all. I don’t know why, I just think it’s fun.”
She often takes a photos and uses them as the blueprints for her paintings. Most of her pictures are against dark backgrounds or capture dark shadows. She used this technique of playing with light when she was at Tulane her freshman year and got into glassblowing. One of her favorite works she has created is actually not a painting at all, but a giant installation filling a hallway with 400 glass raindrops from the ceiling, lit up by led lights that switched colors. The installation is still there today. In this installation, similarly to the way she shoots photos, light is her tool for contrast. Penckofer describes her personal artistic style: “I would say a mixture of realistic and abstract paintings. My realistic paintings are pop art-y and my abstract paintings are kind of chaotic. But a planned chaotic.”
Penckofer’s fashion taste correlates to the color schemes and attitudes she works with in her art. Yellow is her favorite color, and she wears a lot of it. She also loves black and wears neutrals to avoid wearing a really bad outfit.
“I wear super bright colors, which kind of reflects my pop art style paintings,” Penckofer says. “Or, I’ll dress kind of street-style-esque which is more chaotic, edgy or really fun.”
Creating art always brings her back to childhood moments in the museum with her father. Art serves as her release. “Now, everytime I do it, it relaxes me and reminds me of being a kid.”
Penckofer’s free and playful outlook on art gives her a creative space she can return to at any time, and her outlook is reflected in her creations.
“I don’t really care about what it looks like in the end, which I think is a good thing,” she says.
In her final year at Northwestern, she knows she will continue to prioritize fitting art into her schedule. It keeps her calm and seeing people’s happy reactions to her paintings feels rewarding. As an artist, colorblindness is a built-in contributor to the way she works, and it’s something that she is proud to identify with. If she had the opportunity to see “normally” for good, she wouldn’t make the switch.
“I think it’s a cool, unique thing that I could talk about,” Penckofer says “If I ever had a show or something, I probably would focus it around color or being colorblind.”