At the age of seventeen, in a dimly lit pensione in Florence, A.C. Ward sketched from tourists postcards.  "There was something exhilarating about those first sketches. As I sketched the aquiline line of Boticellis' Flora I realized I was drawing my way back in time." At a pivotal age Italy awoke her sense: the buttery light on the Arno River, the taste of wine while enjoying a tuscan sunset, and the endless maze that is Florence.

A few years later Ward studied under abstract painter Frank Hewitt at the University of Vermont.  While many of the students were influenced by the grays ad subdued colors of a Lake Champlain winter, A.C. palette exploded with color - cadmium reds, cobalt blues, and a distinct absence of white.  "Frank ignored the content of my paintings - which was mostly women, chairs and wallpaper.  He focused exclusively on the application of paint, the weight the color, the diversity, the composition of the piece."  His mentorship created an abstract foundation that has been the cornerstone of her painting ever since.

After college, Ward moved to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, under the expansive Western Skies, A.C.'s inspiration turned from an internal source to an external one.  The landscape was the new task masker.  The light, the Rockies, the valley floor all held reservoirs of visual information that needed to be sorted through, distilled, and captured in paint.

On a whim, one year later, Ward packed up her Nissan Sentra and headed for Northern New Mexico.  It was love a t first sight.  The landscape the adobe buildings, the life style were as bright as her college palette.  At the age of twenty nine, A.C. furthered her own career and opened the A.C. Ward gallery in Taos.

In a crumbling adobe decorated with pots of geraniums and her grandmother's wicker furniture, Ward lived the artists dream.  The gallery became a gathering place for artists and art lover's to met She offered figure drawing sessions to a group of young artists referring to themselves as G.R.O.U.P.