Grace Carol Bomer received a degree in Secondary Education in English and History from Dordt University in Iowa and returned to Alberta to teach sixth grade, high school art, and French for six years. Her art career began after moving to Kansas where she worked professionally as a painter from 1976-1981. She studied art in Kansas and continued to study at UNC Asheville after moving to North Carolina in 1981. She also studied art in Amsterdam, Italy, and Ukraine, and teaches workshops, traveling as far as Luxan Fine Art Academy in Shenyang China. Grace continues to maintain a studio in Asheville’s popular River Arts District.

I am inspired by words, especially God’s Word, which is powerful and relevant to my work. Good poetry and the classics are also essential. In my work I attempt to bring together the word/image dichotomy, which was truly brought together by Jesus, the Incarnate Word of God and the image of God. The antithetical battle between the Word and the words of his created ones who have committed “cosmic treason” is referenced in my Babel Series.

The juxtaposition of image and text creates connections and metaphors that may not be predictable or seen immediately. Her aesthetic language of parable, storytelling, and analogy stirs the imagination to consider the story, the eternal drama of God’s grace and love for a broken and fallen world. She calls her work metaphorical abstraction as she paints to makes visible the invisible.

She views her work as “a form of play rejoicing before the face of God” (Rookmaaker). This is reflected in the name of her Asheville studio, Soli Deo Gloria Studio.

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Artist Carol Bomer is certainly familiar with this history. She admires the giants of high modernism. She is intimate with their methods. But she’s not terribly impressed by their underachieving scorecard on questions of faith. Bomer creates her own very contemporary canvases by claiming an inspiration unusual in the art world even now – the power of God, the God of the Bible. …

She is keen to convey the dualities of existence but also question their mutual antagonism – the split between imagination and intellect, faith and science, language and silence, purity and impurity. These polarities have defined western intellectual debates for four hundred years, fragmenting the ego, fragmenting the world.

But Bomer witnesses to the overwhelming divine power that oversees the human fray and beckons humanity back to peace and wholeness. She sees healing potential in Scripture itself. Reading and meditating on the word of God is a decisive source of her own inspiration. From the Editor: Soli Deo Gloria” Ray Waddle, Reflections Magazine, Yale Divinity School magazine ‘2008