Dr. Lynda's Artwork

ART HAPPENS..... 

I have been looking at the world around me through a window of creativity since I was a child. My mother was artistic and never discouraged my artistic vision or flair for resourcefulness. She allowed me to create art out of almost anything that I could find in our house or around the farm. 

I made jewelry out of bottle caps. I painted my own fabrics and learned to sew well enough to design some of my own unusual clothes. I made elaborate science fair projects that always included a significant artistic component. 

 These were various mushrooms I sculpted and painted in the 7th grade. ha!

I painted Disney characters on spare cedar shingles and sold them in local art fairs.  Eventually my dad even got in the act: always the “scrounger” himself, one night he brought home a surplus of casket footboards that he had found behind a funeral home and thought they would make a better surface for my Disney character paintings. I was also commissioned to paint some very large humorous wall panels at the local hospital. I painted murals for hire as early as age of 16.

I still tend to gravitate toward artistic expressions using “found objects”.  Whenever I get the creative urge, I am likely to wind-up at the junk yard, not an art supply store. I’m also quiet frugal,  so I can’t stand to see anything wasted that could be reinvented as a “thing of beauty”. I once painted an entire concrete basement floor to look like hand-made Mexican tiles because I was too cheap to have the tile put down. I've also painted an entire flight of stairs to look like it was covered with a braided runner rug. (I'm sure there's a name for this sort of psychosis!)

You may know that I also weld strange sculptures from scrap-metal: animals, giant insects, people, and furniture.  I love to tackle projects that involve an "expansion of scale": We have a life-sized T-Rex skeleton in our front yard that is made our of old car parts 

and our office will have a life-sized Stegosaurus in the front yard as of July 2010.  

I make a special effort to incorporate at least one or more moving parts in all my metal sculptures. It's a lot of fun.

Lately, I have been keeping a camera within arm’s reach almost 24/7. This habit has allowed me to record very timely and fleeting moments of natural beauty or expressions of delight and understanding. When I take photos, I enjoy offering people an unusual perspective of ordinary items or moments. Recently, I’ve been taking digital photos of some of the unlovable animals, bugs, butterflies, caterpillars and the like.  The office is filled with my photography and smaller sculptures.

Here are some of my photos and some pictures of my sculptures. Enjoy!

 

  

 

    

 

     

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here are more of my metal sculptures: