Finding that middle ground between work and family, art and commerce, and the creative drive and common sense, is a difficult task for an artist.

"It's the nature of the creative spirit," says painter and sculptor G. Harvey (Gerald Harvey Jones)."Throughout history, artists-even the great geniuses who were beloved by their country-were constantly striving for perfection and feeling tentative about their work." The danger, he says, is "you want to chase that dream so bad, that you end up throwing away the qualities of your life that really sustain you."

But G. Harvey, unlike so many of his colleagues, seems to have mastered the delicate art of balance. "I'm blessed to have a job that I enjoy so much. My work is a gift and I want to perfect it to the best of my ability, but other things in my life are equally or even more important," says the artist, who is sustained by his family, his friends and his religious faith. He and his wife Pat have two grown children and four grandchildren.

Born in 1933, G. Harvey hails from Texas hill country north of San Antonio. A prolific painter and sculptor of Western frontier life, he also creates nostalgic and detailed turn-of-the-century street scenes of the world's great cities.
Working out of his 150-year-old stone home and studio in Fredericksburg, TX, he has depicted on canvas and in bronze the stories of frontier life that his father told and his grandfather actually lived. "Many of the stories I tell in my art come from the rough-and-tumble days of the Texas frontier that my grandparents helped tame, or the period of growth and urbanization that my parents knew so well," explains G. Harvey. Discovery and makes liberal use of light, color, shadow and loose, broad brush strokes to capture the feeling of a moment. To portray the warp and woof of the past, he relies on extensive library research and photographic images. But no mere graphic representation, however skillfully or realistically rendered, is successful as a work of art unless it evokes an emotional response in the viewer. "If you can't do that," says G. Harvey, "you've missed your mark."

He makes three or four painting trips every year, accompanied by his wife Pat. In addition to oil paintings, original graphics, and limited edition prints, he creates from one to three bronze sculptures a year. G. Harvey began his lifelong love affair with drawing as a child. His early paintings, like his current work, displayed the artist's passion for blending storytelling with historical themes. After graduating cum laude with a degree in industrial arts from north Texas High in G. Harvey's pantheon of artistic heroes are Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Moran, Childe Hassam, Frederic Remington, and John Singer Sargent.

Art and artists don't exist in a vacuum, G. Harvey points out. "Whenever you go to a major museum-either in Europe or America-you find artists studying other artists' art." He likens a trip to an art museum, an auction, or an art exhibition to "a fine tuning of my color senses and my style. It helps me to express myself better-to be more critical of my own work."

When he goes on a trip, he prefers to leave works in progress behind. Weeks later, he returns to his studio refreshed, and with a heightened sense of objectivity. In those first 30 minutes of reacquaintance, he says, "I can be more analytical and see the fundamentals of a nearly-finished painting in a way that I couldn't see them before."

For many years, G. Harvey has relied on an informal committee of loving friends to advise him on business contracts and gallery arrangements. These overseers, from the banking, insurance, real estate, and investment fields "looked over my shoulder in business, went to my shows and exhibits, and saw things from the point of view of collectors."
He abandoned the security of a full-time teaching job in 1963 and participated in his first prestigious show in 1965, the Grand National Exhibition, where he received the New Master's Award from the American Artists' Professional League. The late President Lyndon B. Johnson and Texas Governor John Connally were collectors of his work. G. Harvey pieces are also in the George Bush Library, and were in the Russian Embassy prior to the breakup of the Soviet Union.