After graduate school, my husband Frank and I moved to Galveston, Texas where we raised our two children. I taught painting and art history at College of the Mainland and was the director of their art gallery where I exhibited work by Wayne Thiebaud, Alex Katz, Paul Georges, Alice Neel, Janet Fish, Rackstraw Downes, Jane Freilicher, Philip Pearlstein, and Neil Welliver among others.

Twenty-one years later we moved to Florida where painting on location in the swamps was a weekly adventure. Finishing a painting in one sitting forced an immediacy of approach---no time to overwork, no time to refine, no time to second-guess that first impression.

Nine years later we find ourselves an hour and a half outside of New York City and Philadelphia. Again on an island---this time at the juncture of the Toms River and Barnegat Bay on the Jersey Shore. Frank is a professor of history at Kean University and I continue to paint full-time. The light on the New Jersey coast is much less intense than in the South. We have lots of snow. The landscape has more umbers and shades of ochre, blacks, whites and grays. It is more abstract and moody.

In 1999, Eleanor Jones Harvey, now Chief Curator, Smithsonian American Art Museum, wrote in an essay for the catalogue of a traveling retrospective exhibition: "Perhaps most compelling about Jean Wetta’s work is its underlying mystical and spiritual sensibility. Far from being straightforwardly representational, her works are invested with metaphor and mysticism." I hope that remains true today.