A couple of arty bits

On a recent trip to one of my favorite thrift haunts (ok, so it's St Vincent de Paul again - I swear that place has been fun lately - soon it will dry up on me and I'll be all about Value Village or The Salvation Army again), I found two nifty arty items.  The first is one of those "paintings" made with... I don't know, some sort of nature?  Wafer-thin slices of wood, or something.  Here, you tell me:

Birds on a branch in a gold bamboo frame.

And what's fun is, the wood slices (or whatever) are adhered to a real painted canvas, so that the branch and some of the leaves are painted on, and other leaves, and the birds, are overlaid on top:

That bird keeps looking at me...

You can even see a sketched-in but neither painted nor stuck-on leaf, just above the top bird's head.  The piece is signed S. T. Young (or possibly Yang, or Lang, or Zang, or Zoung, or Loung...), but I have yet to find anything online to compare it to under any of those names.  It's pretty well-constructed, too:

HECHO EN MEXICO

It's not exactly the most compelling art form to me - the wood-chip-art, or whatever - but I like that it's birds, and I like the details.

My second find from that trip caught my eye much more quickly and gives me warm fuzzies still.  It's an impressionist-style watercolor, I'm guessing from the 60s, of a young mother and two children in just lovely warm yellows and greens:

Sweet 12x12 watercolor in original cream and green mid-century frame.

I love the colors and the dreamy feeling of it - like nothing can touch this perfect, idyllic moment.  The real world is a million miles away.

It's signed M. Storm.

The back  has a label that says "A Truart Product".  Google shows that this was apparently a fairly common distributor? framer? of mid-century art of varying quality, and I found a couple of references to M. Storm, but no real information.  But I don't care; if I were a mom or a mom-to-be, I would build a whole nursery around this painting.  It's so soothing and warm.  I just love it!  

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