“Jersey,” Sara Gagan.

Local Color Gallery is pleased to welcome two new painters, Sara Gagan and Nell Parker, as year-round artists to the gallery.

Gagan’s oil paintings often portray animals, and might be described as representational but with a twist. She often incorporates elements of collage for color, texture, or symbolic meaning. Images of human-made tidbits, other natural forms, even other animals, contribute to the appearance of her subject animals and their environments as a kind of testament to their shared nature. “We are all composed of recycled, reconfigured and ever-changing matter,” Gagan says.

“Lakeside Meditation,” Nell Parker.

Parker’s current work seeks, through the use of scale and viewpoint, to bring new perspectives to the landscape genre. In her miniature works on burl wood, a moment spent in the vastness of nature is reduced to a tiny image that can be held in your hands, in effect becoming a talisman that focuses and distills a particular experience. In her large paintings, she takes something small or unnoticed, such as the forest floor that we walk on, and makes it larger than life, raised to eye-level, and thus elevated to its true importance. Parker received a Human Ecology degree from College of the Atlantic, then pursued art studies at Maine College of Art, University of Southern Maine, Pacific Northwest College of Art, and Portland State University. Parker has shown work in galleries in Maine and Oregon.

Local Color Gallery is open seven days a week. For details, visit localcolorgallerymaine.org.