The "Quiet Strength" three-artist exhibition at the Weyrich Gallery pushes the envelope containing art and artifact. Jeweler Michele DeLong, painter Suzi Gibson Druley, and potter Scott K. Roberts all look to ancient cultures for inspiration.The show combines cross-cultural fetish objects, post-impressionism/surrealism and Oriental/early American ceramics into a potpourri of silent affirmations.<skip>Druley graduated from North Texas State University with a degree in fine arts in 1974. She began her professional career as an abstract expressionist but gave up painting after seven years of artistic isolation. A move to upstate New York in 1993 revitalized her muse and became a permanent part of her sensibility. Five years in a log cabin surrounded by winter snow and cool summers allowed Druley to get in touch with her own spirit. Her work is made up of layers of ideas, thoughts, colors, shapes and figures that represent universal myths and personal experiences. While viewing Druley's complex compositions, works by painters Paul Gaugin, Gustav Klimt, symbolist poets Jean Moreas and Stephane Mallarme spring to mind. Druley's reclining figures with closed eyes that can only dream are much like Gaugin's Tahiti pictures, but she adds hundreds of vignettes, faces, moons, words and patterns that move her work toward Klimt's elaborately embellished paintings. Druley is successful most of the time, but does occasionally stumble. Though I find the highly defined righthand profile in "Introspection" promising, I am less thrilled with the left-facing profile with the superimposed word "shadow" across it. Far more luscious are "Life Stories", "Beneath the Surface", and "Magic Blanket", where written passages hide among the layers like fleeting thoughts and vague memories. These large pieces obviously took many hours to make, giving them the look of ancient places marked through centuries of passers-by. Overdrawn lines become incised into the surface of the paper and images seem to be carved. Unlike artists who kill paintings by over-working them the longer Druley spends on a piece the better they get.