She has taken art classes galore earning a bachelor of fine arts degree from Alfred University, and a master of fine arts from the School of Art Institute of Chicago. But for the past 46 years while others may have been painting landscapes, portraits and still lifes, she’s been doing abstracts.

“I was raised going to the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester … and the Albright Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo,” she said. “I saw abstraction at both places. I try to capture the natural world abstractly and have felt since my beginnings that an abstract painting captures my thought and makes it physical.”

Other influences include her mother who did landscapes and earned her bachelor’s degree around the same time Weld did, and two artists who were 30 years her senior, one from Manhattan and the other from New Jersey.

Weld said she applies at least three basic ideas to her works: “(1) Abstraction is visual philosophy; (2) surface is a film of conscientiousness; and (3) insecurity breeds profound process.”

“I find color to be profound,” she said at a recent exhibition at Keene Arts in Keene. “I love color. So I guess I see the life force. That’s something I see a lot, the life force. I also love juxtaposition, something that creates beautiful tension. My work is not sentimental but visual philosophy. I love beauty, but I think the type of beauty my work is about is the natural world.”

Such elements of the natural world that inspire her works may include the light out in a hay field, or the flights of various birds, she said.

“I had a professor at Alfred who had a studio in a hay field, and I love the light in a hay field,” she said.

Another source of inspiration came from a time when she worked at the Museum of Natural History in New York City.

“I love the world of fossils. They’re like the study of time, and I think you can see time in my paintings,” she said.

Weld has two series of works from which she is likely to choose when doing an exhibition. She refers to the earlier one as “The Home Ec Series,” a collection of about 160 paintings done between 1994 and 2003 that reflect the domestic history of women and were inspired by her experiences taking home economics class in seventh and eighth grades.

Works from this series may include a painting next to a piece of fabric stretched over a frame.

“I paint with chopsticks as a way of explaining the domestic history of the female,” she said. “I have painted with brushes, but right now I’m using chop sticks.”

Weld calls her other series “The Vertebrae Memorial Series,” about 23 paintings done between 2003 and 2006 that are “inspired homages to the natural world. They are not fabric but acrylic on artificial flowers next to an oil.”

To her, the difference between an abstract painting that is quality art and one that is not may involve the “lack of decorative color or a serious palette. It is hard to say. It’s much better to be in front of the work in question. I believe art should be a profound statement, not a lighthearted one.”

One might say Weld’s father instilled a certain homage to the natural world in her by taking her along on his many hikes up the 46 Adirondack High Peaks.

“He’s a three-time 46’er, so I was raised climbing with him,” she said.

To get a firsthand view of her works, one may visit her studio at 312 Sam Spear Road in Westport. She’ll also have a piece in Artists of the Mohawk Hudson Region that opens up Oct. 11 at The Hyde Collection at 161 Warren St. in Glens Falls and runs through Dec. 4. Weld is also doing her 29th solo show currently at SUNY Geneseo, which runs through Oct. 12 in the Bertha VB Lederer Gallery.