Lori Reed's Biography

Growing up on a farm in western Illinois instilled in Lori Reed a passion for nature and a deep sense of the movement through the seasons. She spent her childhood surrounded by animals, pastures, crops and woods. She loved going with her dad to see the newborn baby calves out in the pasture in the spring ... playing in the creek ... picking wildflowers with her parents in the timber ... watching birds from the rudimentary tree house she constructed ... lying in the summer grass looking at the stars filling the dark night sky ... waiting for the unbelievable sunsets beyond the rows of corn ... sledding down the big snow-covered hill in the pasture in front of her house.

Lori’s grandmother and mother were both nature lovers and always pointed out beauty when they saw it. The affect they had on Lori is that she responds to nature in her daily life and brings it into her work. When Lori was seven years old, she made a drawing of a deer and handed it to her grandmother. Her grandmother’s eyes grew wide and she exclaimed, “Why, Lori, you are going to be an artist one day!” The seven-year-old felt her future had been foretold —as grandma never lied—and believed from then on that she was an artist in the making.

Lori’s high school art teacher encouraged her in art and pushed Lori to apply to colleges. Her dream was almost derailed when her high school guidance counselor mistakenly told her “you’ll have to be a nude model if you go to art school.” When she finally got the courage to tell her art teacher why she’d stopped her college search (after all, she assumed her art teacher had done nude modeling in order to get her art degree!), the teacher set her straight and got Lori back on course.

Lori was in a fine art curriculum for two years of college and then switched to graphic design when a summer job in design ignited her interest. After receiving a BFA in graphic design from the University of Illinois, Lori worked in graphic design for her career. But fine art crept back into her life in 2005 in the form of mixed media collage. Lori’s first husband, Rob Reed, was a graphic designer and sculptor. He encouraged Lori to pursue art outside of her “day job” of designing for clients. In 2006, the two had their first of four gallery shows together where Rob exhibited stone and metal sculptures and Lori showed mixed media collage.

Lori’s first body of work was in the traditional sense of mixed media collage. She used old photos, book text, maps, Viewmaster reels, and interesting papers to hint at a story when placed together in a collage. After a trip to Yellowstone National Park in 2009, she was filled with a strong desire to use photographs from the park in her art. Running filters on the images in Adobe Photoshop so as to make the work more painterly, she experimented with cutting the prints into rectangles or tearing them to combine with other variations of the image.

Shredding...
While preparing for a collage workshop with local college students for “recycling weekend,” Lori had the idea of putting papers through a shredder to give the students something interesting to work with. A light bulb went off: she could run the altered images of her photos through a paper shredder and make a new scene out of the quarter-inch strips of three or four altered photos!

Lori has since fine-tuned the process and cuts the strips with an X-acto knife and ruler so that she doesn’t spend so much time sorting the strips of paper. She will add handmade papers, strips of topographical or road maps into the image, book text or pieces from an old ledger book. She was given several small bags of shredded U.S. currency from the Federal Reserve, so those little pieces appear in the foliage of her landscapes.

Chapter Two
Lori’s husband Rob died in 2014 following a heart surgery. Devastated to have lost her partner in life, work, and art, Lori turned to art making as a way of finding her path back to the living. She shared walking her grief journey with Kevin, a high school classmate (whom she’d dated off and on during their junior and senior years). As the months went on, they realized if they could ever date someone again it would be easy to start with someone they’d dated 40 years before. They are now married and grateful for a supportive Chapter Two with another partner. They travel often and Lori takes photos with a future collage in mind as she frames each shot.

Joy
If you meet Lori, you quickly realize she’s a positive, happy person. She brings that outlook to her art making as well. On each cradled panel, she writes the word “JOY!” in pencil in the lower left corner. She says she feels joy when she starts working on an art piece and hopes a viewer will see the artwork, feel a connection to it, buy it and feel joy every day they look at it in their home or office.

Her Art-making Process
Once people stand in front of some of her work, they always ask, “How much time do these take to make?” Lori responds, “All my life” as she’s realized it’s been a slow build of skills over the years. She took three photography classes in college, so it’s second nature to know how to frame a good photo to start with. Her classes and work as a designer taught her eye-flow, composition, and Photoshop skills. She resists timing the creation of a piece as that’s too much like her career as a graphic designer — tracking billable hours! Instead, she loves how she has no sense of time as she’s creating. She’s simply in a happy creative space. As she’s painting each strip of paper with matte medium to glue it down, and then coating the surface with more medium, her fingers get coated as well. She loves the messiness of the creative process — and the joy.

Spreading the Joy
Lori has been exhibiting her artwork since 2006 in group or two-person shows. She’s had her work accepted into national juried shows in Illinois, Iowa, New York and Colorado. She was awarded the Purchase Prize in GALEX 44 in 2010, so her piece “More Than Merely Ourselves” is in the permanent collection of the Galesburg Civic Art Center. In 2011, Lori received an Honorable Mention prize in the Open Small Works show of the National Association of Women Artists Gallery in New York, New York for her artwork “Impressions”. Over the past 15 years, she’s sold her work in galleries located in Arizona, Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Montana and Wisconsin. Lori retired from graphic design at the end of 2019 and is devoting herself completely to the joy of creating art.

 

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