Squirrels

Having fun with squirrels!

Experimenting

I saw a painting of a shorebird with rectangles of black and white behind it, with some text and spirals in the color fields. That got me to thinking about how I could work with color fields behind a silhouetted bird. So I laid down some metallic gold paper with some blue ledger paper and cut out a great blue heron photo to lay over those. I photographed the composition and then added some white "spatters" and a white line between the colors in Photoshop. I ran filters on the image and printed out three versions to cut into strips. I built my artwork by combining those strips of paper with some of the original ledger paper and handmade papers. I then made a second composition using the same metallic paper, a star chart from a 1919 book and a cut out barred owl. In the final artwork I added in some of the gold metallic paper, script from an 1868 household expense book and some handmade papers. Lots of ideas for future compositions are building in my head....

The first two photos show the compositions I photographed and the second show the resulting 12" x 12" artworks.

As 2022 begins, I'm dreaming of warm weather...

It's been rather cold in Illinois this January, so I've been making art of warm vacation scenes. 

"Blooming Desert" is comprised of multiple digital alterations of a desert photo all cut into strips and combined with colored pencil, handmade papers and vintage stamps. 14H x 11W.

"Steadfast" depicts a view up from the beach at a regal palm tree made of multiple digital alterations all cut into strips and combined with handmade papers, book text and vintage stamps. 11H x 14W.

"Join Me" depicts 4 chairs at Ephraim, WI facing Green Bay. The altered imagery was cut into strips and pieced together with additions of handmade papers, vintage postage stamps and shredded U.S. currency. 10H x 20W.

First Friday Gallery Talk

I really enjoyed giving a gallery talk at the Contemporary Art Center on Friday. I gave a brief history of my art making and showed a work in progress. It's always a good exercise to evaluate what it is you do and how to convey the thought process as well as the physical process. I shared some of the details of my work... like writing the word JOY! on every panel before I start the art... showed embedded stamps and ledger paper in the pieces in the show... told the fun story about being handed 3 bags of shredded money by a gentleman staffing the Chicago Federal Reserve booth at a bank conference...lots of good questions and comments. 

My two-person show is up!

My work is being exhibited along with the sculptural ceramics of Chris Dokolasa at The Contemporary Art Center in downtown Peoria through October 15. I'm very pleased with how the show looks.

Water Lily Series

I took a lot of photos of water lilies when we were in Florida, so I decided to make a series of art pieces. These are called Dragonfly Dream #1 - 3. All have handmade green papers in the lily pads, blue ledger paper from 1858 in the water, and shredded U.S. currency "floating" among the pads. (available for purchase on my website lorireedart.com)

Art is flying off to new homes!

I sent three pieces of art off today! 

One was an enlargement on canvas, going to someone's new winter home in Florida. Another was a commission for a wife to give her husband of him on his sailboat, they live in Omaha, Nebraska. The third was a sale made this morning to a regular customer of Xanadu Gallery in Scottsdale, AZ. I'd purchased a page in their bi-monthly catalog of art, and a man in New Jersey bought it upon receiving his catalog in the mail.

Good art day!

Door County plans

Plum Bottom Gallery in Door County, Wisconsin is planning for a big year of tourist visits and art sales - yay! They sold 9 of my pieces last year, have 11 in their two galleries currently and want 15 new pieces to start out the spring season. NICE! I have enough appropriate imagery from my recent show to fill that request, but wanted to make a couple more from photos I took when in Wisconsin last spring. This sweet lighthouse is at the entry of the Sturgeon Bay Ship Canal that gives ships a shortcut from Lake Michigan into Green Bay; there's a Coast Guard station next to it as well. After layering up my three versions of the photo in quarter-inch strips of paper, I embedded segments of some vintage 3-cent postage stamps depicting sailors and a Coast Guard ship.

Working Bigger

I don't normally work this big, but felt the landscape needed to be BIG. This 18"H x 24"W x 2"D mixed media piece took 27 sheets of legal paper cut into quarter-inch strips to build up the imagery! I added in lots of different types of green papers, some gold, and bits of text from a hundred-year-old agricultural newspaper. The original photo was taken by me during a hike north of Boulder, Colorado and show the South Saint Vrain Creek.

New Year's First Artwork

During this pandemic winter of hibernation, I was looking through my photos and decided to make art from a photo my husband took of our resident barred owl in our backyard this summer. I added some text from a yellowed 1921 agricultural newspaper and decided to include some individual letters from headlines as well as small text. Hmmmm, I think I'll need to experiment some more with that!

The day after finishing this piece, the owl appeared at twilight in our snowy backyard. Nice.

Turning toward the desert

A gallery in Scottsdale, AZ, plans to bring my work in once the pandemic calms down. I made this 16" x 20" piece with that gallery in mind. It uses a photo of an old car in a ghost town in Arizona, a photo of saguaro cactus and an old license plate. Filters were run on the composition of the three images, prints cut into strips and pieced together, and old postage stamp segments were added to the band of cactus at the bottoms.

Moments of Joy

Photographer, Ellen McDowell, and I have a show up through Dec 23rd at the Galesburg Civic Art Center. Due to Covid-19 restrictions, the show is now by appointment only, but I'm so pleased friends and relatives are making time to go immerse themselves in a room full of beauty.

Sail Away With Me!

Just immerse yourself in this scene... hear the waves lap against the sides of the boat... float away from it all! This 12"H x 9"W mixed media piece is comprised of three filtered versions of my photo, cut by hand into quarter-inch strips of imagery which I adhered to a panel and sections of an 1854 blue-paper ledger added on the rippled water.

Daisy Days of Summer

I seem to be on a flower kick! This scene of dewy daisies at sunrise got really interesting after running filters on the photo. I picked three versions to cut into quarter-inch strips and combined those with handmade green and yellow papers, text from a French book, and shredded U.S. currency.