LOREE HARRELL
Art 2010
 
The Mirror Project
Woodstain Paintings
The SandWords Project
The River Rocks! Project

LOREE HARRELL BIO

Sometimes you can draw a perimeter around a thing and what falls inside is enough.  Loree Harrell has lived all of her life in a thirty mile radius of where she sits right now.  Thirty miles to the east, thirty miles to the south, thirty miles to the west.  Most of the all of the days spent within ten miles of right now.  While not unaware or uninterested in what lies beyond, this is where she lives, and what forms and feeds her art and her words.

There was a river - there is a river - and a studio in an old school on the side of a road.  There was a tiny house on a scenic highway, much-loved dogs and trees and two more rivers, and, in the background of it all, one fine mountain.  These were what defined, informed, surrounded, held.

In 1994, Harrell was solidly ensconced in a corporate career and being offered a publisher's position in Las Vegas, with her only hesitation being whether she was willing to do five or ten years in Vegas, or hold out for a slot closer to home and heart.  Just then, a series of fortuities led her to a beautiful log house on a sweet spot of the Sandy River.  The river won.  Two days after moving in, she knew the river and the job couldn't exist in the same space and she tendered her resignation, cashed out her profit sharing, and went to the river to write.  One year later, almost to the day, she received word that Body Speaking Words would be published in the spring.

In 2000, she set up a writing studio in a classroom in the old Springdale School.  One day, in the lull of a story, she was scribbling to get her hand and brain moving together, and she saw a glimmer in the scrawl that seemed like it was maybe something.  The art took over from there like it had just been waiting in the background for her to notice.  For the next four years, she spent fifty to a hundred hours a week with ink and oil and acrylic and canvas and paper.

There was a move of home and loss of studio at the end of 2004, followed by a year of casting about for a voice for the art in the much diminished available space of the home studio.  With just a whisper of 2005 left, she put woodstain on paper and knew she had found her medium of choice, completing over a hundred paintings in the following four years. 

Throughout this time, Harrell worked a graveyard shift at a hotel desk, chosen because there was time in the middle of the night to paint and draw and write, and because the "day job" could be energetically left at the door to focus on the real work.  There were the daily hikes to the woods and river with the dogs - the pack having grown from one to two to now four - always with a camera if it wasn't mid-downpour, and then, when the camera smashed on the rocky river beach, with the cell phone, trying to capture  glimpses of the delight and peace of those walks.  Her current primary work, The Mirror Project, is her attempt to tell a part of the story, show a bit of the magic that can sometimes fall inside the perimeter of a thing.

Harrell feels that the work is, in the most literal sense, leading.  From inception and through each incarnation, the next thing to be done has revealed itself, always unexpectedly, as a new trail to explore. Her job is step to step to step and some days you arrive in a place. 

Inside the perimeter of a thing.

Loree Harrell
Current Projects -2010

The Mirror Project

 

Inception 01.01.10
Completion of all 11 Phases, of 111 images each, projected for 2020. 
Phase One completion 01.10.10. 
Phase Two release 10.10.10.

The Mirror Project is the primary focus of 2010 and into 2011.  Focus will be on completion of the first two Phases and making/fulfilling commitments to exhibitions and galleries. 

The SandWords Project

Inception 2007
Ongoing project with no targeted end date, currently consisting of over 200 images.  This project combines words and image, worked on site on the Sandy River, Corbett, Oregon. 

Each installation recorded photographically, then left to the river to wash away.

The River Rocks! Project

Inception 2008
Active May 2010 through December 2010
Found Art project, worked on site on beach at the Sandy River.  Charcoal on rock - larger stones left on display, smaller worked and then turned upside down to be discovered by others accidentally.  Each placement recorded photographically, then left to the elements to fade back from existence.

Woodstain Paintings

      

Inception 2005
I am continuing to work with woodstain on paper, with the goal of completing  500 sq. in. per month.  The woodstain painting is my ease, and my continued  practice in the medium reflects my belief  that this work is the core of what I am here to communicate.  The hidden things are most clearly here.