Growing up in Alexander City, a small mill town in Central Alabama near the shores of one of the South's most beautiful lakes, Graves developed a wonder-filled artistic vision. Her art has an emotional, feminine sensitivity and her eye a highly intuitive sense of color. Favorite themes are childhood joy, relationships in her small town, faces wearing crowns, a yellow party dress, Ball jars filled with zinnas, bathing suits at the lake. Her palette ranges from bold, joyous and playful colors in her more expressive work, to the subtle, elegant whites and earthtones she uses for her formal portraits.

Graves started her artistic career as a child, working with paint, collecting parking lot glass and broken stuff from neighborhood houses, and flower picking throughout her neighborhood. She began painting seriously in junior high school, and later attended the Atlanta College of Art where she received a bachelor of fine arts in 1989. She's studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, and painted in Mexico and the West Indies.

"Everything that I paint includes some personal symbol, an icon from me, that I take from my own health and well-being," Graves said.

Graves discovered that she works best when she experiences her subjects on an almost meditative level. "If I think too much when I paint, I have to scrape it all off and throw it away," she said. "But when I live into the experience, when I respond to light, shape, form, contrast and the basic elements of painting, when I'm on that level, it works.”

Three pivotal experiences of deep pain, the first at age 4, a battle with alcoholism in her teens and recovering from what was diagnosed as terminal melanoma in her 20's, tempered Graves' vision and continue to bring spiritual depth and maturity to her work.

"That yellow party dress hanging on a pine tree at our lake cabin, that's my heart. It's like an image of all that's good and spiritual and hopeful in me," she said. “When I'm creating I am listening to God instead of hearing my ego."

Graves has published a book of paintings, photographs and verse entitled "White Wings" that tells the story of her miraculous experience with cancer. After being diagnosed with cancer and undergoing radical neck surgery, she moved to San Miguel, Mexico, on a spiritual quest. There she learned that the cancer had returned. She made white wings from palm fronds and wore them as a backpack through the streets of Mexico. She painted each day as if it were her last, wearing her wings. In doing so, she experienced an epiphany: the value of each moment lived in love. When she returned to the U.S., the cancer was gone.

Through a catharsis of art and spiritual revelation, Graves believes she painted herself well. "In healing -- realizing I need to live in love and not fear -- I went to the first moment I could remember which was a childhood wound. In my paintings I honor the voice of that child and make the positive memories -- those sources of joy in my life -- shine in technicolor instead of letting the bad experiences shape my life," she said.

Lila Graves' artwork and her life are one ministry, a communication of the experience that love transcends the emotional and physical worlds. With paintbrush and canvas, Graves shares a visually joyous testimony to the healing power of art.

Graves married Jonathan Bloom in 1993. The couple and their two beautiful daughters, Lucy and Bea, live in Alexander City, Alabama.