Lou Davies James isn’t just content with being a poet. She takes her words and reconstructs them into picture books for adults, designed for visual fireworks.

“My favorite thing is working with altered books,” she said. “For my bigger art pieces I use children’s board books—the kind that if you give them to toddlers, they can’t chew the paper off.”

She gets them at bargain tables and garage sales with the intent to completely transform them using gesso, a plaster-like white paint mixture used to prepare a surface for painting.

“It completely covers the original book, giving me a blank canvas to work with,” she said.

James then layers mixed media upon each piece, often with a Victorian or Edwardian theme.

Many of the photos she uses comes from the public domain, which she prints out and then layers with other ephemera such as button and lace.

Her work is divided up into her art books and her “bread and butter” commercial pieces, such as notepads, greeting cards and bookmarks. One such artwork on display at Harbor Artisans, a Belfast cooperative for juried Maine made items, is called The Three Eves after one of James’ poems self-published 10 years ago.

“This is about the transition between the maiden to mother to old woman or crone — the phases of a woman’s life,” she said. “The overall theme of the piece is you keep going on, no matter what. A woman’s strength comes through in each stage of her life.”

For someone who has embarked on her second career as an altered books artist ever since retiring from running a daycare center for 28 years, James’ Three Eves resonates personally.

“Life is a progression,” she said. “Every experience builds on the next. Your beauty continues more internally than externally with those phases.”

James is currently showing her work at Harbor Artisans in Belfast, along with the Artist’s Co-op of Southwest Harbor.