I paint my versions of heaven; places that are beautiful and meditative not found on earth.

Call me an optimist, but I believe that art can heal. Man has the powerful ability to dream, to create better worlds and new realities. And images play an important role in this. Our history begins with images, which go far back in time, even farther than language, and are cross cultural.

We are united through images. I keep this in mind daily as I am barraged through news and media with sensationalist stories and events of world crisis. Part of me wants to join the peace corps but instead I paint.

I paint with the conviction that my images can heal.

SEEN ABOVE: Images by Nancy Reyner. Top and on Front-Page mastheads: "A Brief Glimpse." Bottom: "Flower Stem."

WORDS ABOVE: by Nancy Reyner, read more HERE.

Releasing self
into Great Self
I become subtle
and fall in love
and fall in love,
calling all hearts
to Joy.

Opening heart
into Great Heart
I cry out,
and evolve
and evolve,
calling all hearts
to The One.

Deepening peace
into Great Peace
I surrender
and free
and free
my limitless self,
calling all Hearts
to The Source.

Seen above (and on front-page mastheads): "Noticing God Layer-By-Layer" by Kathy Bozzuti-Jones

Words above: Calling All Hearts by Kathy Bozzuti-Jones

I paint to interpret and preserve the spirit of experiences which have meaning to me. Three reoccurring themes are gender roles, the innate humor of life and the personalities of farm animals as metaphor for, and participants in, human experience. I am a lover of still life. My favorite tool is color. The brighter, bolder, and more luminous the better.

Sometimes I imagine us as sound waves containing unlimited opportunity to be glorious in volume, timbre, color, key and rhythm. Because we coexist on this planet, our lives’ melodies interact, generating harmonies of creativity and power, silence or (often) dissonance.

Seen above (and on front-page mastheads): Art by Melissa Hefferlin. Top/front-page: "Remnants of Joy and Disaster;" Middle: "Royal;" and Bottom: "First Red Dress."

Words above by Melissa Hefferlin. Read more here.

I place myself firmly in that long tradition of printmaking and sculpture which values drawing and careful craftsmanship as a means of working, and narrative and protest as a significant subject matter.

While I admire the work of many contemporary artists, my most significant mentors have been Rembrandt and Käthe Kollwitz, whose magnificent gifts of hand and eye served always to convey their passionate concern for humanity. Like them I am particularly interested in the way that the gesture of the body communicates a person’s life experience.

This does not mean that I disregard my graduate school training, which stressed — almost exclusively — formal qualities such as composition, color, and line. But in my work I hold these formal qualities in tension with the idea, striving always to use them as means of expressing content. I would agree with Ben Shahn that form and content are inseparable.

Seen above (and front-page mastheads)—Art by Margaret Adams Parker Top/Front-Page Mastheads: "Beatitude" Middle: "Käthe Kollwitz" Bottom: "Unless you see through my eyes…"

Words above by Margaret Adams Parker.

I've always been drawn to water, its colors and textures, its shapes and sounds; from the roar of the ocean to the bright tranquility of a sun-sparkled creek, from the rush of a rainstorm to the seeming endlessness of a quiet sea. Its light and dark, its tranquil beauty and its mysterious depths. Its ability to take me to the stillness within, to ancient memory and half-remembered visions, from which my paintings emerge.

I express not specific physical landscapes/seascapes in my paintings, but rather a mystical geography, reminiscent of the seas and stars and desert expanses, and the stillness of those depths. And like time spent at the water's edge, my work invites a response in kind – a deep observation and introspection.

Seen above (and front-page mastheads)—Art by Angela Rockett. Top/Front-Page Mastheads: "Cloister View" Middle: "Elemental" Bottom: "Twilight Silence"

Words above by Angela Rockett.