My beloved sister-in-law, a gifted artist, once advised me that “art should be easy.”  Yes, her art is easy, effortless, and elegant—technically perfected, intelligent in design, and richly colored with emotion. 

But…I’m not there yet.  Just look inside the flap behind my right ear and you will see roiling turbulence.  A road trip between Buena Vista and Salida slaps me alongside the head with its light and shadow play on cloud, rock and plains.  The black of Angus against pale golden stubble dusted with snow slams me against the wall. Clambering on rocks in Depoe Bay, Oregon, I am sliced to ribbons by cross-currented waves that carve a tumultuous path through those waters.

I take pause before my blank canvas, the snippet of unbleached muslin that is the base of my work.  It stares back.  Innocently defiant, it hides the knowledge of what it will become.  Within moments, days, weeks, months, I will wrestle with and pummel elusive and invisible images into being, not knowing why or how I am led.  I am obsessed with the most tangible and intangible of elements—rock, water, sky, transparency, iridescence, color, stillness, motion—and my works alternate from one theme that I revel in, to the next.

Though the finished work has no memory of the process, for me it is the journey, not the destination, that I crave—the process, not the product.  And the addiction to the process is what both pursues me and leads me on.

Grace Harbin Wever, Ph.D.
Buena Vista, Colorado
One sleepless night in January, 2005

Date revised: 1/16/2005