Arts and Entertainment

Piera Pugliese’s flowers will bloom at the Millcroft this summer

May 21, 2026   ·   0 Comments

By Constance Scrafield

“I’ve come a long way,” said Piera Pugliese, a visual artist. “Things have percolated for me recently.”

She attributes her success as an artist not only to her considerable talent but to her inclination to say “Yes!” to every opportunity to show her art. Presently, she has two solo shows in Toronto locations. These were collected and installed by Hello Art, the company that seeks art from across Canada, to hang in indoor spaces with plenty of foot traffic. This is meant to enrich the spaces and to promote and support Canadian artists.

Following a Call for Submissions from Headwaters Arts, of which she is a member, Pugliese is most particularly preparing for another solo show at the Millcroft Inn in Alton, from June 1 to August 4.

This show, titled “The Earth Laughs in Flowers,” is a flurry of her flower paintings inspired entirely by that quote from the poem “Hamatreya”, by Ralph Aldo Emerson in 1847.

In April this year, a letter from Lani Kopczinski, Curator of the Government of Ontario Art Collection, informed Pugliese that her painting, Balsam Lake, which was hung in the Government of Ontario Art Collection is “currently on loan to the Office of the Lieutenant Governor of Ontario, Edith Dumont and is being considered for inclusion in the current exhibition Together – Ensemble at the Lieutenant Governor’s suite on the main floor.”

Pugliese talked about how she loves Balsam Lake and how her painting of it does not show the water but the trees around it.

“I was up there and there was no view of the lake – it was all trees.” she explained.

Balsam Lake was a process that started as abstract, then pastel, and finally oil paint, and is more abstract than the work Pugliese is doing now, she commented.

“I like to paint flowers but my way. I get to do what I want because that’s fun.”

Pugliese’s real foray into art came once she and her family fully retired. They had owned and run an Italian restaurant for many years in Toronto, where she still lives. By that time, when Covid struck, it was reasonably a time when they might have closed the business anyway, and the struggle other restaurants were making to remain open was more than they wanted to extend.

“Once we were fully retired, I got into it,” she said, joking, “My life in art is making more dust than I am.”

Last year, through July into August, she staged her solo show, “The Next 50 Years,” at the Headwaters Arts Gallery in the Alton Mill, in which she showed a collection of her landscape paintings. Yet, there was more purpose to the exhibition than to simply present a number of attractive paintings in praise of nature. It is a reminder for us to understand and care about how overdevelopment will affect our wonderful and fragile surrounding landscapes. As an artist and environmentalist, Pugliese’s paintings will record and report these stories.

Indeed, her next project will revolve around nature and cities and how we can co-exist.

“Alton Mill is a destination,” she remarked. “Once you get there, you really understand the emotion the artists are creating; the feeling that comes over when you’re there. What I do is engage with the place. Everything there is a one of a kind.”

At the moment of this interview, Pugliese was getting ready for the Flowers show in the Millcroft Inn, counting what must be remembered, like having just finished 25 somewhat smaller pieces. Tabletop signs are needed, as are notes displayed with the artist’s statement.
“It’s the last of the flowers,” she said. “I’m going back to landscapes now.”

Pugliese briefly mentioned serving on the Board of Directors of the Women’s Art Association of Canada (est. 1887).

“It’s still going after 135 years, it has 230 members,” she said. “Women artists are still welcomed to apply to a very supportive environment.”

She and her artist daughter, Ester, are teaming up to do a show at the Gladstone in Toronto in the fall. When her daughter was 12, Pugliese went to OCAD to study drawing and painting. The education she got there does not exist now, she believes. Then, there was a focus on knowing how to draw and paint in classes discussing those basics for the whole year.

“Once,” was Pugliese’s touch of irony, “women were only allowed to paint flowers.”

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