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I love finding art in unexpected places

My work explores themes of healing and inclusion with humor, and often through non-human creatures.

About Lucky

Lucky Platt creates children's picture books, life size bear paintings, crankies, mixed media animations, relief prints, paper sculptures and more delights in her lakeside home studio in Burnham, Maine, where she lives with her husband Jim Macdonald, a master woodworker, luthier and marquetry artist. Lucky and Jim also work collaboratively as Bunkhouse Studio.

Lucky’s debut picture book, Imagine a Wolf (Page Street Kids 2021) was a 2022 Maine Literary Awards Finalist in Children’s, a 2022 Ezra Jack Keats Award Finalist in New Writers, a 2021 New England Book Award Finalist, and has been translated into Korean and Russian. Her stories explore themes of resilience, healing, positive self expression and inclusion, and are often illustrated in traditional art mediums such as oil paint, ink, gouache, graphite, paper sculpture, drypoint, pyrography and colored pencil. She has presented narrative art and writing workshops and artist talks for children and adults through the Society of Children’s Book Writers & Illustrators (NESCBWI), Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance, Maine Media Workshops & College, Maine Crafts Association, Waterville Creates, Maine Arts Commission, and many libraries, schools and indie bookshops. Lucky is a grateful recipient of three Maine Arts Commission Project Grants, one in 2016 for a curatorial project, another in 2020 for the development of her website and a 2022 literary arts grant to support a visiting author/illustrator program at Unity Public Library.

In 2024, Lucky is honored to be working with the Farnsworth Art Museum as an invited artist with Arts@theIntersection and Vinalhaven School seventh graders. She is a regular contributor to Maine Home + Design Magazine Showcase. She is also the Artist-in-Residence for her rural town library, Unity Public Library (UPL), where she helped write a successful 2023-4 organizational grant from the Maine Arts Commission supporting the library’s Children’s Storyteller Series. In collaboration with Illustration Institute, the UPL Children’s Storyteller Series brings award-winning children’s book creators to western Waldo County for readings, book talks and art activities, as well as Storyteller Suppers with visiting creators and library community members, hosted by Lucky and her husband.

Lucky grew up in northeast PA and studied writing, painting, drawing and printmaking at Vassar College, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Complutense City University of Madrid. She is always learning and enriching her craft, and has participated in workshops with Maine Women Writers’ Collection, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, The Arts Students League of New York, Farnsworth Art Museum, Society of Visual Storytelling, SCBWI, Highlights Foundation and Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, among others. She is a proud member of Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance, Maine Crafts Association, Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators and the Center for Maine Contemporary Art.

Connect with Maine writers at FindMaineWriters

Maine Home + Design Magazine profile written by Katy Kelleher and photographed by Christina Wnek September 2021. Photo by Christina Wnek for MH+D

 

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THANK YOU

Website design by Matchstick Communications and funded in part by a 2020 Project Grant for Individual Artists from the Maine Arts Commission, an independent state agency supported by the National Endowment for the Arts.

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