Kimry Jelen's life has been shaped by two passions. From the time she could crawl, she wanted to be near horses and as soon as she could hold a paint brush she fell in love with putting shape and color on canvas.

The Sisters artist now combines the things she loves most. She is an expert equestrian trainer — and she has found acclaim for painting horses.

It was a long road with many turns that brought Jelen to Sisters. She grew up in Albany in an artistic family, but the idea of pursuing art as a livelihood was slow in growing.

"My family is pretty artistic," Jelen said. "We used to play with clay, we used to paint. It was just part of our life — but it wasn't viewed as a career."

So when it came time to choose a path Jelen chose something as close to art as she could that still held out the promise of a viable "career." She attended Brooks College in Long Beach, California, to study fashion design.

She developed a passion for theatrical design and for outdoor clothing.

"I took the outdoor route because it incorporated more of what I wanted to do," she said.

Jelen worked for O'Neill Wetsuits, for Nike and for kayak clothing designer Royal Robbins in the late 1980s, the pioneer days for new materials that enhanced comfort and performance.

"We had such a fun time back then," she said. "We were designing clothing to make people's lives better. There was a purpose."

But Jelen got restless as the work grew more corporate and she — literally — ran off to be a cowgirl. She moved to Montana at age 30 in 1997 and started working for cattleman Tiny Starkweather, herding cattle and dudes. "He saw how much I loved being outdoors," Jelen said. "He'd send me so far up into the mountains to chase cows. I felt like I was 10 years old again. Yahoo!"

After long days of work, Jelen would sketch horses in the pastures — but the desire to paint was still germinating. The equestrian passion was dominant.

Jelen moved to New York to perfect her riding skill in elite schools and earned classification as a Certified British Horse Society Stage III eventer. But after living in new York and Connecticut, she missed the mountains of the West and she returned to Montana, then headed south to New Mexico, where she latched onto a huge, old-fashioned family cattle outfit, Farr Cattle Co.

"I was in heaven because they did everything on horseback," she said.

She learned a lot about the way right-thinking ranchers approach their roll as stewards of the land.

"I was really lucky to work with people who appreciated what the land had to offer," she said.

Then came a watershed. She returned to Oregon to be near her family during her father's lengthy illness. She spent three years in Portland and took art classes and a fire grew. Though her father recovered, his experience gave her a new appreciation of the fragility and shortness of life — a sense that she must pursue all her passions.

"I thought, Œwell, what would I regret if I didn't do in life,'" she said.

The answer was clear: she wanted to be a serious artist. She also didn't want to be a broken-down horse trainer at age 75.

"It's such a hard life; it's so hard on your body," she said.

So Jelen moved to Sisters and found the perfect place to balance her twin passions, to become a serious artist and to continue her love affair with the horse.

For one thing, it's horse country: "Horses everywhere!" as Jelen says with great delight.

But more importantly, Sisters has become a profoundly engaged art community.

"People pool their talents together to create a quality art environment that showcases and supports the arts," Jelen said. "As a community we work on cultivating the art scene. Here, we recognize if our fellow artists create better and better work, it benefits us all as a group as the area gets a better and better reputation — we don't have that competitive environment, it's all about the creating and having fun doing it."

She continues to train horses. In recent years she has brought mustangs along from scratch, turning them into skilled dressage horses.

She rides and she paints; she paints and she rides — and it all revolves around horses. The two endeavors tend to feed off each other.

"Another way the community is supportive of my art is the people I work for and the horse groups I'm involved with have encouraged me as an artist," Jelen noted. "Sometimes I take my paintings into work and get really productive feed back from them."

Jelen's career as a serious artist has that ring of overnight success — built on years of education and experience. In the five years she has been in Sisters, she has become a premier artist, with her work featured at High Desert Gallery and profiled in equestrian and art publications.

Things have come together well for Jelen. After years of roaming, she seems to have found a home.

"I live with a wonderful guy, Dennis McGregor, a creative artist, singer, songwriter," she said. "We built this studio, it seems like an artist's retreat with our two little studios. It's quite the life. I am lucky and enjoy what I do for a living. The only time it feels like work is when I've got to do the books." Visit www.kimryjelen.com.