Paintings

Mrs. Pagremanski's paintings are documents of the city's past and present each captures a city building or block at a very particular moment in time. Mrs. Pagremanski typically begins a painting by setting up her stool, easel, and canvas on a city sidewalk, taking out her paints, and immersing herself in the bustle of a New York City neighborhood.  Over the 20 to 30 visits of a site that it normally takes to complete a painting, Mrs. Pagremanski becomes a familiar presence to the people who live and work in the neighborhood, and those people often become part of the painting.

Real people populate most of the paintings - from the shopkeepers, shoppers, vendors, and passers-by on the Lower East Side to the stockbrokers, security guards, and tourists that surround the New York Stock Exchange - and each person is an individual. No stock figures appear in Mrs. Pagremanski's works.  Says the artist, who came to this country in 1947, "When people are seen as individuals, they cannot be dismissed as faceless members of society".