Laura Levine bird paintings

Laura Levine's new painting show, titled Tweet Suite: Birds of North America, opens at TAG Art Gallery in Nashville this Saturday. Levine painted birds on backgrounds of vintage trading stamps on birch panels. Seen here, "Birds of the Pacific Northwest." (Opening the same night at the gallery is Mekons drummer Jon Langford's show of old country music star paintings.) All of the work is viewable online. Here's what Laura told me about her new bird paintings:

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This is the first time I've tackled a subject so natural in my paintings. Up till now it's mostly been portraits (humans) and objects. I had a lot of fun researching the different birds, contacting ornithologists, bird watchers, etc.

I also really love how randomly the stamps are pasted onto the individual pages. I usually find them in completed books, which means some housewife (generally) saved up all her stamps from grocery shopping and then pasted them into the books, and depending on her personality, she was either really neat and obsessive about it or made a mess, and that can be seen in the grids. But then you gotta take a moment to mourn the fact that these were stamps that were never cashed in for the toaster or whatever. And now they have found a new life, fifty years later.

Link

Previously on BB:
• Laura Levine: Music Photos Link