For many years, Edna Hibel has been painting from five in the morning till five in the evening—usually seven days a week.

"For me, it's like breathing," she says. "It's what I love. I get inspired just by looking at someone passing me in an airport terminal or something that catches my eye in the corner of a room. That's my big problem in life. For everything I paint, there'll be at least a thousand that I'll never be able to paint. There just isn't time."

We talked within minutes of Hibel's boarding an aircraft to fly to Zurich for three weeks to work on a set of original stone lithographs—something she does at least once a year.

"I discovered painting when I was nine," she told me, "and I've never stopped drawing and painting in the 77 years since. I was supported by parents who gave us children unqualified love. Even before I could express that love in painting, it became part of my life. I loved my friends, I loved my family. I was surrounded by so many wonderful people I really respected.

"My mother bought me loads of painting supplies, and soon I was trying very hard with my brushstrokes to show how thrilled I was just to be alive. I can love a blade of grass, a drop of water, or even an insect—almost anything. They represent ideas that are so magnificent, so powerful, that I can't help doing whatever I can to make others aware of them."

Hibel's success in reaching people through her art is confirmed by the fact that she has received a medal of honor and citation from Pope John Paul II, and has been presented to Queen Elizabeth in London.

Her work has been commissioned by a bicentennial committee at the White House and by the US National Archives, and has been shown in more than 20 countries on four continents. Her paintings can be found in such places as United Nations headquarters, the Russian Academy of Art in St. Petersburg, and Harvard University.

Hibel is the only American woman to have won the coveted Leonardo da Vinci World Award of Arts, and was the first American woman to have an exhibition in the People's Republic of China. She was also the first foreign artist twice to exhibit her work in the former Soviet Union.

Many people, even in the United States, have admired and enjoyed Hibel's work without realizing who she is and what she has achieved. I admitted to her that I had walked by four of her original stone lithographs in a Boston home once a week for 16 years without thinking of asking who had done them—even though I'd always delighted in the happiness she'd captured in the eyes of the girls in the pictures.

What is important, Hibel suggests, is that I recognized the peacefulness in those children and her way of expressing some of the joys of parenting. However, these joys, says her husband of 63 years, Theodore Plotkin, cannot be fully realized without acceptance of the need to care for and nurture one's children.

"Observe [in Edna's pictures]," he says, "the serenity with which her mothers carry their children and babies, and the resulting calm of the children. They are all embraced by an inner peace. The mothers seem to know instinctively where lies the better life."

"I adored every minute of my own experience of parenting," Hibel recalls as she looks back on the time she and her husband spent raising their three sons. "So often I found myself saying, 'I mustn't forget this minute,' determined to capture it later in my work. Like, for example, the day I was talking on the phone to a friend and one of the boys raced by. I said in happy astonishment, 'Oh, a little sunbeam just ran by me!' I wanted to record as many moments like that as possible, because I felt so strongly about them."

Many of Hibel's pictures of children are among the 50 to 80 works on display at any given time in the Hibel Museum of Art on Parkside Drive, Jupiter, Florida—a suburb of West Palm Beach. The museum is a multifunctional cultural and educational institution where scholars, artists, and the public can find the resources for the study and appreciation of a broad collection of Hibel's work.

The museum includes 380 Hibel original paintings, drawings, stone lithographs, and porcelains donated by the museum's founders, Ethelbelle and Clayton Craig. Clayton Craig was a member of The Christian Science Board of Directors.

"The Craigs used to describe me as a 'natural Christian Scientist,' which I took as a great compliment," Hibel says. "I didn't consciously try to express spiritual concepts in my work, but they said they saw there much of what they believed in, which included such qualities as love, and kindness, and goodness, and peace.

"And the Craigs were such beautiful, true, wonderful people that our own kids quickly fell for them, too. When our youngest son, Richard, was about 11, he wrote them a letter saying, 'Dear Mr. and Mrs. Craig, Could you come for dinner every night? I love you.'"

In the Hibel Museum there are several watercolors that capture what Plotkin describes in a philosophical statement on his wife's work as the ingredients for a society in which "all individuals can reach their full potential and live lives of excellence, grace, and beauty, in harmony with their fellow citizens.

"The same inner peace," Plotkin continues, "can be seen in the attitudes and expressions of the people in [Edna's] paintings of farmers working in the fields. There is no hint of weariness or resentment; only what might be called dedication to the tasks at hand, and satisfaction with the results and with the fact that they were allotted such an important assignment in life."

"No matter where I go," says Hibel, "I am struck by the beauty of humanity and nature. I am of the school that believes that beauty and harmony are necessary and important ingredients in art as well as life. ... And since art begins with an appreciation of life, things are important to me in proportion to how they contribute to life."

Edna Hibel is working on about 100 new paintings—some half done, some three-quarters done. "That's why I don't get painted out," she says, "because I'm working on so many different things. And I never have favorites. I always love the one I'm just finishing. When I've finished it, I love it. But then on the other hand I think, 'Oh, well, tomorrow I'll do better.' But I don't part with a painting till I love it. Till I know it's the best I can do.

"I couldn't imagine life without my art," she adds with a sigh of gratitude. "Or without the wonderful people who've helped make this all possible."