"Think about motorcycles… how wonderful they are," she says reverently. "A human being can climb on this - this chrome and steel, this beautiful piece of machinery - just climb on and fly like the wind." A few years ago, Hopper's love for motorcycles manifested itself in her art; she painted a series of sleek, shiny Harleys, straddled by joyriding Hawaiian women. The old Suzukis she painted are ridden by women in kimonos.

Though Pegge Hopper has no intention of jumping on a softtail Hog and riding off into the sunset, she is a little wistful about the whole thing. "If I were twenty years younger, I'd definitely be riding a motorcycle right now."

Pegge Hopper was born in Oakland, CA and raised both in California and Michigan, the daughter of a homemaker and the owner of an auto interior company. She began drawing as a child. "I got a lot of encouragement for it so I kept on doing it," she says. "In those days, there wasn't this importance on being something or somebody; you just did what you could do."

After Hopper graduated from high school in the mid-fifties, she attended Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. Luckily for Hopper, the school had a strong focus on the business of art. "Art Center taught you to be very responsible - none of this bohemian stuff. You didn't just sit around waiting for the news to inspire you."

Portfolio in hand, Hopper went off to her first job - designing murals for New York department stores. After traveling in Europe for a year, she took a job at La Rinascente, one of the largest department chain stores in Italy, succeeding a Swiss designer who had set the tone with her elegant graphic design. It would prove a tremendously formative experience for the eager young artist.

"This was only about 15 years after the Second World War. Italy and Europe were going through the new threat of communism; the Berlin Wall had just gone up." Like many other capitalist ventures, the store was trying desperately to establish an institutional image. "Instead of doing ads for shoes, corsets and dresses, we would do seasonal promotions, big posters that would sum up the whole feeling: SPRING IS HERE! They wanted them to be very beautiful, very arty. I realized this was a wonderful opportunity for me to really push myself and try to do my very best."

Encouraged by the Italian community, Hopper began to take herself seriously as an artist. "I was exposed to this whole tradition. Artists were treated as important and valuable, as if we were special. Or at least that's the way I felt." For two years, Hopper lived and worked in Milan. When she returned to the United States, she got married and moved to Los Angeles.

In 1963, Hopper and her husband came to Hawai`i on vacation. "When we went back to Los Angeles, we just decided that we didn't want to live in all that smog." With their six-week-old daughter, the family decided to explore life as malihini. "It was like moving to the Outback! We struggled for many years; we both put in our dues. But I never regretted it."

Soon after her arrival, Hopper began working as an art director for the ad agency that would, over the years, morph into Starr Seigle McCombs. "I was there for two years and I decided that being a art director was not my cup of tea, but I needed the security of the income. Thank goodness I didn't stay!" she laughs.

Her extraordinary career as a fine artist began quietly. "One weekend I just started painting. I used to go to the archives here in Honolulu to look at the old photographs. They inspired me so much!" Hopper studied the archives carefully, in particular the David Kalakaua photography collection, and began to paint.

Then, a friend who was an interior designer began renovating Kona Village on the Big Island. "She saw my work and commissioned me to do twenty of these paintings for the little hale that were there. I never looked back."

Over the next several decades, Hopper's images became known throughout Hawai`i and collected all over the world. She had one-person shows in Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle, New York, and Japan. Her paintings are found in the permanent collections of the Hawaii State Foundation on Culture and the Arts, the Bishop Museum, and the Contemporary Arts Center.

The wahine in Hopper's paintings are strong, voluptuous, and languid; deftly and sparsely rendered in muted pastel tones. Interestingly, none of those wahine actually exist. "I never work with live models. I've just developed this archetypal person. She's nobody in particular, except my vision of how I see the beautiful Hawaiian people. And I think of her as sort of androgynous, not totally that sexy female and not much a man… kind of in between."

In March 1983, the Pegge Hopper Gallery opened on Nu`uanu Street in Chinatown. She has worked hard for almost twenty years to keep the walls covered with a seemingly endless flow of images of that lovely, enigmatic wahine. "It's not hard-driving and commercial like, say, Wyland's gallery, which is just for the tourists. I would like to think that it's an honest gallery."

And now, she says, it's time to move on.

"It's not just keeping the walls full, although that's part of it. It's the responsibility of making sure that everything works well. It's having the right person manage it for me, just keeping everything the way I think a gallery should look. And it keeps me trapped in a style that I know has commercial value. Twenty years is enough."

Pegge Hopper is on the verge of a big change. "I wish I were more adventuresome in my art. I'm hoping that when I get rid of my gallery, which I think will be next year, I can start doing new and adventurous things that I don't feel are derivative of anybody else. That's what I'm doing: looking for a new style."

For the time being, she's immersing herself in something quite new. "I'm going to build myself my little dream house. I bought a lot in Pacific Heights and I'm working with my architect to come up with something that will be wonderful for my old age, and yet satisfy me aesthetically and make me happy for the rest of my life," she says.

Whatever Hopper does with her work, it won't just be change for the sake of change. "I don't want a lot of shock value or arbitrary spontaneity. I want to really feel what I'm doing - which means that my whole attitude toward my work has to change. It's a big challenge. I hope I have the health and longevity to live up to it."

We hope so, too.

Visit Pegge's wonderful Web site at www.peggehopper.com.