Alyce Glazer Levy’s Super Natural Art

She embellishes nature’s cast-offs—stumps, antlers and skulls—with bright colors and clusters of crystals and gemstones

PURPLE AND GOLD ROYALTY 
Acrylic on wood, 15½ x 17 inches
modernslice.org

THE ARTIST: Alyce Glazer Levy

KNOWN FOR: Embellishing nature’s cast-offs—stumps, antlers and skulls found in her home base of Dallas and vacation town of Telluride, Colorado—with bright swoops of color and clusters of crystals and gemstones.

IT STARTED WITH A STUMP: “I was driving down the street, and there was this stump on the side of the road. It became so interesting that I convinced my friend at lunch that we needed to go back and put it into my car.”

WITH THIS RING: “When I got it home, I looked at all the whorls in the wood. They were so beautiful—the way they sort of nest in each other, and the different years have made them do different things. My first thought was: What can I do to highlight this beauty that’s already so beautiful? And that’s when I started painting the circles that followed the whorls around. I don’t ever want to cover up what nature did; I want to work with what nature did.”

COLORS HAVE FEELINGS: “It’s really about telling the story: What color would tell the story that I’m trying to tell? What colors make that feeling? A lot of times I’ll pull my color scheme from a bird or from my daughter’s eyes. I like to pull from things that are everyday.”

INSPIRED BY TELLURIDE: “I do pieces with skulls and antlers that have been found in Telluride. Their shape is just majestic. I liked the fact that there were little scratches here and there, like it told a story of a big life. When I embellish them with crystals, I’m imagining a life that is really big.”

NEXT: “I just want to paint. The other day, a friend dropped a skull with horns on my front porch, and I named it Hank. He’s all kinds of bright colors—crushed glass all over the place, and smoky quartz, hematite and obsidian. He’s crazy.”