By Edie Nicholson

Lee Cowan is relatively new to the artistic experience, but she is quickly developing both her new profession and her own signature style as an artist.

Cowan's unusual style encompasses a number of art forms, including mosaic style concrete. tables and benches, mobiles, hand built functional pottery, and contemporary sculpture in simple, primitive forms.

Originally from Fort Smith, Cowan had lived in Little Rock for I almost 20 years before moving to Stone County about four and a half years ago. Her art career began when she took a pottery class at the Arkansas Arts Center about 10 years ago. She began making handmade pottery and sculpture and later started experimenting with concrete because she wanted to make bigger pieces, and she wanted a material that could be used outdoors, she said.

Most recently, she has been focusing on her garden art, including benches, stepping stones and planters.

Cowan previously worked as a psychotherapist for 20 years and said her profession has influenced her, work, which often includes psychological and metaphysical humor. For example, one of her sculptures, entitled "Superman Thinking," portrays a caped, headless man in a pensive pose. Cowan explained that this represents our tendency to try to cope with problems without using our heads.

In addition to her sculpture, Cowan also makes a number of functional pottery pieces that are handmade, as opposed to being formed on a potter's wheel. Some of her pieces, which include pitchers, bowls and planters, are formed by coiling and stacking strips of clay.

Another item Cowan has been making recently is an artistic mosaic piece, which she calls Stones Scapes. Consisting of collected items set into a concrete base, Cowan's Stone Scapes and her similar tabletops include a variety of materials. Stained glass pieces, tile and beads are common components in Cowan's work, placed alongside small toy figures, buttons, jewelry, and anything else that attracts her attention and adds an interesting element to her art.

Cowan obtains her materials from a variety of sources, including friends who often give her beads, stained glass pieces, and other materials from their crafts. "My friends give me an incredible variety of beautiful things," Cowan said. She also visits thrift shops, garage sales, and 75-percent off bins, looking for the unusual items she uses in her mosaic pieces. She finds many of her materials in nature, including snake skins, old rusted machine parts, feathers and rocks.

"I'm just looking for the thing I think is really gorgeous whether I know what I'm going to do with it or not," she said.

When designing a piece Cowan begins by visiting her large collection of materials, which is housed in a studio outside her house. She selects a group of item that she wants to include in the piece and then begins assembling them as she works, rearranging and removing some pieces.

"I get an idea for what I want to make, be it a mobile or a bench or a sculpture, and I look for things to put together that I like," Cowan explained.

"They're pretty much all just intuitive designs. I don't draw them out."

She said she sometimes begins with the idea of what she wants to make and looks for materials, but she is sometimes inspired by a certain item that she wants to include in a piece.

Most of Cowan's work is characterized by its mosaic quality, including a wide variety of elements combined in a single piece

In addition to her sculptural pieces, she also makes mobiles and what she calls "connecting stones." Each set of connecting stones includes a pair of similarly decorated small pieces that are intended to be shared by two people who are separated, possibly with one stone placed at a grave site or other special place to remember a lost loved one.

One of the materials Cowan uses in her art is a cement-based mixture called "hypertufa," which is an imitation of a porous natural stone called "tufa.' It is much lighter than ordinary concrete and is used to make a variety of items, including tabletops, plants, and sculptures.

Cowan's husband, Mike Oglesby, has recently begun helping her construct the forms she uses for her concrete bases.

She plans to sell how-to sheets containing the recipe of her hypertufa mixture and the technique she uses to assemble her mosaics.

In addition to her art, Cowan writes a periodical article called "Stone County News' about her experiences adjusting to life at her new home at Meadowcreek.

She also writes some poetry and is a member of the Stone Soup Writers' Group. She and her husband enjoy gardening and preserving food and have established a vineyard at their home where they hope to begin selling grapes to other home winemakers.

The studio tour will be the third showing of Cowan's art, which has also been included in the Ozark Folk Center Christmas Show and the Arkansas Craft Guild Christmas Showcase.

She currently has some of her pieces for sale at the Arkansas Craft Gallery in Mountain View, but she is relatively new to the process of marketing her work, she said.

"This whole art thing is new to me,' Cowan said.

"It's taken me 54 years to do these pieces,' Cowan said. "I could not have done them before I got here.