Julia Crane is a multimedia artist who primarily depicts creatures – including a plethora of birds – surrounded by tiny, even microscopic, elements from the land and sea magnified to a great degree. Phytoplankton, seed pods, DNA strands, and even the flight pattern of birds co-mingle with animals commonly seen by humans.

Her work considers the impact of change on the environment in sculpture, intaglio, encaustic, paintings and woodprints. Some recent collaborations at marine laboratories in Maine have given her access to views of the single-cell organisms often included in her art.

By depicting microscopic elements swirling around and through subjects in amplified scale, she questions how people are impacted by influencers they can’t see.

A Maine native, she grew up in Camden and has been creating art for more than three decades. Her first exposure to art classes was in the basement of the Camden Library when she was six. Since then, Crane’s work has been shown in more than 40 exhibitions, including collections and museums in Russia, Paris and New York City.

While living and creating art in Santa Fe, New Mexico, she was represented by the Turner Carroll Gallery, and for more than a decade she remained in the rich art culture of the area, creating work that was shown internationally and acquired for permanent collections including The Citadelle Art Foundation of Texas, Museum of Women in the Arts and the Podesta Collection of Washington, D.C., and the Michael Woolworth Collection of Paris, France.

By 2000, Crane had returned to her Maine roots to and built her studio in Thomaston, a Maine town where she still lives with her husband.

People-Nature-Art is a free monthly series that brings artists, writers, carvers, and creative types of all kinds to the Gilley to explore how nature and art interact in their work.