The late Lou Reed warbled that “there’s a bit of magic in everything…”

The art of Lori Bradley clearly exemplifies that. Her paintings are an exploration of particular aspects of the natural world — dense treescapes, glorious sunsets, babbling brooks and critters of all kinds.

But it is her images of birds that take center stage. Birds in flight, birds at rest, birds of prey, birds as potential prey, and birds of a feather flocking together all coalesce, forming an interconnected reality.

It is as if the grackle or the owl that appears in one painting could swoop into another, a shared universe unto itself.

Bradley, who maintains a workspace at the Hatch Street Studios in the North End of New Bedford and teaches at Brldgewater State University, has an ongoing series called “Common Birds.”  But there is nothing “common” about them.

Her bird paintings are not at all like the perfectly rendered and perfectly dry ornithological illustrations of the great naturalist painter John James Audobon. Although a realist in the broad sense of the term, Bradley is more accurately a symbolist, infusing deeper meaning into the ordinary.

Her paintings meander into the mystical, mythological and magical.

Bradley has noted that her spirituality is rooted in the natural world and it originated with her mother, who often took her out to experience natural phenomena even when it meant extreme discomfort, as when they would watch Lake Ontario freeze over in circular patterns when the temperatures were well below zero.

As a child, she felt nature was magical and that it presented symbols and rhythms as some sort of cosmological guidance. That thought was reinforced by a love of nature-based fairy tales and the illustrations that accompanied them particularly those by Arthur Rackham and Kay Nielsen.

She remembers when they would go camping, her older brothers enjoying frightening her with stories about the trees having faces, and that they could hear them talking and that their branches could snag her.

But she liked the fright. As she grew older, she read tales and essays rooted in the mysticism of nature, noting the writing of Carlos Castaneda to the New England Transcendentalists and pagan mythology.

That love of pagan mythology, be it Celtic, Norse, Greco-Roman or other, is evident in her avian paintings. Owls evoke wisdom, swans signify music and song, and crows are tricksters, existing in the plane twixt life and death.

Bradley seems to have a particular affinity for the corvids, most notably ravens. In Norse myth, the ravens Huginn (thought) and Muninn (memory) sit on the shoulders of the All-Father Odin, avian advisors who guide his decrees.

In Celtic mythology, ravens serve Lludd, the god of artists and artisans, which is apt for Bradley.

Bradley is married to the animator, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth art instructor and kite maker extraordinaire Mark Millstein, who shares her love of nature and that mutual reverence reinforces the inherent magic.

At present, Bradley is working on a series of large scale paintings exploring the concept of home and looking at from the outside in. Of course, there are birds in them symbolizing transition and leaving home.

Her father insisted that she — at the age of 18, like her siblings before her, leave home and move away. It was a painful experience. She never returned.

That Lou Reed line concludes… ”and some loss to even things out.” Bradley’s paintings exemplify that too.