About the Artist

About Anne Conover

Anne Conover is a painter, ordained United Methodist clergy, and Artist in Residence whose work brings together a lifelong love of art with a vocation shaped by faith, theology, and ministry.

Anne was raised in Atlanta as the daughter of accomplished portrait artist Jacqueline Sligh Collins. Both her mother and her father, Joseph Collins, were deeply involved in Atlanta’s arts community and were devoted supporters of the High Museum of Art. Art and the museum were woven into Anne's formative years. She remembers the original High family home alongside the museum, later volunteered at the High. Surrounded by painting, artists, museums, and conversations about art, Anne developed an enduring love of art and art history and learned early to look closely—to notice faces, light, color, gesture, and the beauty contained in ordinary life.

Her path also led to theological study and ordained ministry, culminating in a Doctor of Ministry (D.Min.) from Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C., with work focused on the relationship between art, spirituality, and theology. Throughout her years of ministry, the visual arts remained an essential part of how she understood faith, beauty, creativity, and the human experience.

Working primarily in oils, Anne paints in a contemporary impressionistic style characterized by expressive brushwork, luminous color, and an emotional response to her subject. Her work includes portraits, florals, landscapes, and scenes from everyday life. Rather than pursuing photographic realism, she seeks to capture the spirit and feeling of a moment.

Community is also central to Anne’s artistic practice and ministry. As an Artist in Residence, she regularly brings together artists from across North Carolina’s Triad for shared studio time—creating space to paint alongside one another, exchange ideas, learn from each other, and enjoy the fellowship that grows through making art together. For Anne, facilitating this creative community is an extension of both her art and her ministry. She believes creativity flourishes in relationship, and that gathering around art can become its own means of Grace.

For Anne, the studio, Space for Grace, at College Place UMC has  become a meeting place for the many threads that have always been woven through her life: her mother’s artistic legacy, her love of art and art history, theological study, ministry, creative community, and a deep desire to communicate the lavish love and abundant grace of God.

Today, Anne understands her art and ministry not as separate callings, but as expressions of the same vocation. Through paintings filled with color, light, beauty, and life—and through the community that gathers around the creative process—she invites others to pause, look more deeply, experience connection, and discover the grace present in the world around them.

Artist’s Statement

Space for grace 

Painting is my preaching voice. 

I use words for the pulpit.

I use brush, color, light, texture, canvas, and beauty in the studio.

Both communicate the same lavish love of God. 

And when given the choice, I would rather pick up the brush.

Art has always been part of my life, woven alongside an equally deep desire to communicate the lavish love and abundant grace of God. From my earliest years, I was surrounded by painting, artists, museums, and the beauty of the created world. I learned to look—to notice color and light, faces and landscapes, and the extraordinary beauty held within ordinary things.

At the same time, I was discovering another way of seeing: an awareness of God’s presence and an abiding desire to help others know how deeply and extravagantly they are loved.

For many years, these two great loves—art and the desire to communicate God’s love—traveled side by side through my life. Over the last two decades, I have come to see that they were never separate paths at all, but expressions of the same calling. Painting is a preaching voice for me.

I believe we are surrounded by Grace. God’s generosity is present in the abundance of flowers, the changing light across a landscape, the character revealed in a human face, and the quiet beauty of ordinary life. Painting asks me to slow down and pay attention—to look deeply enough that the familiar can become wondrous again.

My paintings are quiet sermons.

They are not intended to explain or persuade. They are invitations: to pause, to wonder, to delight, and perhaps to recognize something sacred in what we so easily pass by.

Whether I am painting a portrait, a landscape, or flowers spilling exuberantly from a vase, I am drawn to light, color, movement, and relationship. I work primarily in oils with an impressionistic approach, allowing visible brushwork, texture, lost edges, and unexpected passages of color to become part of the story. I am less interested in reproducing exactly what the eye sees than in expressing something of what the heart experiences.

For me, beauty is not merely decoration. Beauty awakens attention. It can slow us down enough to notice Grace.

I have come to understand that both my art and my ministry begin in the same place: with paying attention. Both are rooted in relationship. Both ask me to look deeply, to love what is before me, and then to offer something of what I have seen to others.

My hope is that a painting might create a moment of encounter—a moment of joy, peace, remembrance, gratitude, or wonder. If someone pauses before one of my paintings and sees the world, another person, or even themselves with a little more tenderness and hope, then the painting has done what I hoped it would do.

Every brushstroke is an act of gratitude. Every painting is an offering of hope.

God’s glory is always blooming. I simply want to help us notice.

Art As a Means of Grace

Art as a Means of Grace

For much of my life, art and ministry seemed to travel along parallel paths. I loved painting and the creative life, and I also felt deeply called to ministry. For years, I understood them as two important but separate parts of who I was.

Then came an awakening that changed the way I understood both: these were not two different paths at all. They were the same path.

My doctoral paper, "Art as a Means of Grace", grew from the Wesleyan understanding of the “means of grace”—those practices through which we open ourselves more fully to receive and experience God’s Grace. Through my studies, ministry, and my own experience of creating art, I came to understand that art can be one of those places.

Art invites us to slow down and pay attention. In creating or experiencing art, we can become more present to what is before us and more receptive to wonder, beauty, gratitude, and the sacred. The face of another person, light across a landscape, a flower in bloom, or something familiar we have passed a hundred times can suddenly reveal more than we noticed before.

That understanding is behind the name of my studio, Space for Grace. It is the physical place where I paint, but over time the name has come to express something much larger. I want my art, my studio, and the community I have with other artists to be places where we make room for creativity, connection, beauty, and Grace.

I no longer see art and ministry as separate callings. Painting, teaching, gathering artists together, and ministry all grow from the same desire: to create spaces where we can become more attentive to the presence and generosity of God.

I believe God’s love is lavish and God’s Grace abundant. Grace shows up everywhere—often in the ordinary and sometimes where we least expect it.

We simply need to make space enough to notice.