Two more critter pieces for Exhibit A holiday show

 

Squirrels

Having fun with squirrels!

More experiments with animals and birds

I'm having fun combining photos of wildlife with collaged backgrounds!

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.

Camino memories

I've made two pieces that are evocative of my walk on the Portuguese Coastal Camino route this spring. They each feature ceramic tiles of designs found on buildings in Portugal, the arrow and stylized shell used to mark the Camino route, and photos I took along the Atlantic coast. Each is 10"H x 20"W x 1.5"deep on a wooden panel. Filtered photos cut into strips, handmade papers and colored pencil.

Work resulting from my Camino walk

While walking the Portuguese Camino de Santiago last month, we encountered this open door in a stone wall. It was standing open, inviting us to step through onto the rocky shore for a breath-taking view of the Atlantic Ocean. Don't you want to walk through this door, too?!

In addition to the three cut up altered prints of the photo, I've added some handmade paper and some pieces from a vintage newspaper (roughed up with sandpaper), areas of the collage were enhanced with colored pencil and gouache.

"Portal to the Atlantic"

14"H x 11"W on 1.5" deep wood panel

available at lorireedart.com

The second image is a close-up detail to show the text that appears throughout the stones. The third photo shows what the artwork looks like in 3-D.

These make a nice pair

I took the original photos while on walks on the island of Curacao. I liked how the plants were featured in front of the plain, colorful walls. In each, I've embedded text or handwriting, handmade papers and shredded U.S. currency. Each is 12"H x 9"W. The shot of them together also shows some fossilized corral from the island.