Maggie Reed

Artist Statement

Unconventional artist Maggie Reed is fascinated by the mystery and beauty found in the creations of God and man. She is a collector of treasures both living and dead, natural and man made, perfect and imperfect; she is captivated by their individual forms, intricate structures, textures, and colours. She sees, hears, and listens to everything that ignites her senses, stirs her curiosity, and entices her to look deeper to find ideas and stories that capture her imagination.

Ever the visual storyteller, she modifies, manipulates, transforms, and travels with them on a journey to the next level of her creativity and imagination, inviting the inquisitive and adventurous to journey along and to always look beyond the expected.

Using her own photographs, drawings or photopaper/cyanotype negative prints composed of natural and man made objects, she creates her unique pieces one at a time using a light table, acetate film, ink pens, selected papers, and gouache. Hand tracing each design to film, she will manipulate, modify, detail, and refine her work before adding gouache, ensuring each painting is an original.

Preferring a "hands on" no pencil line, no photoshop/computer style of design, she continues to use the multistep creative process that she developed as a student while studying in Scotland.

Her minimalist art is inspired by the Botanical Art of 17th-18th century artists, Art Deco and Art Nouveau styles, and the Radiograph works of Steven N. Meyers.

Biography

Bòidhchead an dà chuid beatha agus bàs ~ Beauty in Both Life and Death

Artist Maggie Reed is a Visual Story Teller, Textile Print Designer, Photo paper and Cyanotype Negative Print Creator, Gouache Painter, Creative Writer, and Photographer who lives outside of Philadelphia Pennsylvania.

Her small studio is home to many types of dried flora and foliage, animal bones, dead bees, butterflies, insects, and insect wings, glass discs, plastic rings, marbles, textile fibers and yarns; a variety of odds and ends; as well as an open creative off the wall imagination that is always seeking new adventures and experimentation with mediums, colours, and techniques.

Exhibition History (CV)