Combining music and art is my passion. I have created numerous series of artworks addressing blues, jazz, classical, R&B, and rock genres. In the south music envelopes life, and here I find a huge well of inspiration. My abstractions address the pure joy of sound with a daring and dramatic flair, through textures, line, shape and color, advancing and receding interweaving to form compositions on canvas. Each piece is in the truest sense an improvisation, allowing the art to progress extemporaneously on its own — taking shape and coming alive filled with energy. Schafer has been a professional artist over 23 years, galleries representing her are Art Works, Richmond, Va.; Oddfellows Gallery, Hattiesburg, Miss.; Mary C. O’Keefe Gallery, Ocean Springs, Miss. She is a recipient of the Mississippi Arts Commission Fellowship Grant and the Andy Wahol Grant. She has exhibited most notably in the Smithsonian Museum’s Museum on Main Street program and at William Jefferson Clinton Presidential Library, Minnetonka Center for the Arts, Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art, Meridian Museum of Art, Gulf Coast Community College, and Meridian Community College. Her works reside in collections at the Meridian Community College and Omni Royal Orleans. She has been published in “Katrina, Reflections of Mississippi Women,” “Walking on Water,” “The Art of the Storm, a documentary film,” Art in America, Art Gulf Coast, Florida Tech Today, Where, and Times Picayune. Her academic background includes a Bachelor of Science degree in Geological Oceanography from Florida Institute of Technology, Melbourne, Fla. where concurrently, she attended adult art studies at the Brevard Art Center and Museum.