Andrea Smisek Gage did not find art. Instead, she said, art found her. Her mixed-medium plein-air exhibit, “Seasons Times & Places,” displays her journey of finding peace amid chaos and offers a moment of meditation to viewers.

Around a decade ago, Gage left her work as an adjunct professor at the University of Alabama-Birmingham and took a position at the University of Iowa. However, when both her parents were diagnosed with cancer, she committed herself to caring for them, along with her three children, full-time.

Though free time was limited, she took up painting courses at Maroger Fine Art Classes in Coralville, Iowa; her new practice brought solace to her life.

During those classes, Gage learned the basics of fine art, giving her the skills needed to transfer what she learned into other mediums.

“With art, there’s a lot of feeling and creativity which is great, but technique is good because then you make your choices on what you want to do,” Yvette Jury, the founder of Maroger and Gage’s instructor, said.

For a series that studied great artists, Gage recreated Édouard Manet’s oil painting “The Lilac Bouquet” as an exercise in underpainting, the process of adding a base layer of color to a canvas before adding other values. Before recreating the actual bouquet in Manet’s piece, she covered the canvas in orange, complementing the various shades of blue seen in the vase.

She transferred this technique to paper, using dry pastels to create her original “Taking the High Road” depicting a serene landscape with a patch of tall grass, a flowing river, and broad fields that stretched into the edge of a clear sky.

The orange underpainting highlighted the paper’s texture but blended seamlessly with the image as a whole, peeking through the added values and depicting the piece’s history through its layers.

There is a history to the piece that isn’t stated through its complementary values. “Taking the High Road” was a plein-air painting of a stretch of road she and her dad would drive down on their way to his cancer treatments.

Gage explained that road construction had blocked the fastest route to the hospital, so the detour they took eventually earned the nickname “the high road” as it sat higher, overlooking a beautiful landscape.

“I don’t even know the name of the road, we just called it the high road,” Gage shared.

Capturing a moment of beauty during chaotic times meant Gage didn’t always have her art supplies on her. In emergency rooms or carpool parking lots, she had to use whatever materials around her — whether that was a chewed pen, golf pencil, or a crumpled receipt.

“All of a sudden, the notepad in my purse became [something] I could sit and use during medical appointments at the hospital, wherever we happened to be,” Gage said.

Her dad lived with stage four cancer for 15 years but always looked forward to the next fun thing he could do, and, despite his late-stage diagnosis, Gage said her dad maintained his good humor.

Together they could talk about her art rather than the implications of his diagnosis.

“He wasn’t going to sit and talk about feeling bad,” Gage said.

Her exhibit’s themes of seasons, time, and places from which it takes its name consist primarily of plein-air paintings. The depicted landscapes document the moments of peace in times of her life when peace felt scarce.

For Gage, those places ranged from her neighborhood and her vacations to hospital parking lots.

“[They were] points in time and places of beauty that I was able to capture,” Gage said. “It’s different from a photograph, it’s more of a feeling.”

Gage hopes that others find creative outlets in times of chaos and uncertainty and allow it to soothe them. By sharing her art, she hopes others will feel inclined to be a part of a larger creative community.

“It just gives me a pleasant feeling,” said one exhibit attendee, Mike Shy, as he looked through the gallery. “I just enjoy the ambiance of being around art.”

Gage’s exhibit will be on display at the Artifactory until late December.