Somewhere along a mind-numbing stretch of Highway 290 on the way back from visiting her daughter  at Rice University in Houston, Barbara Attwell began to get a little angry.

In a way, she was descending from heaven as she drove, dreamily remembering the hours she spent in Houston visiting the galleries that pack the museum district. In a few city blocks, the Museum of Fine Arts, the Contemporary Art Museum, The Menil Collection and the Rice University Art Gallery stand their posts amid a slew of other internationally-known museums and galleries. Every imaginable genre of art has a decent shot at finding wall space somewhere in the rich cultural mecca.

“Everywhere you turn in Houston, there is another place filled with art,” she said. “The financial support for visual arts is wonderful there.”

Atwell turned her thoughts to Austin. Not to take anything away from the Austin Museum of Art or the Blanton, but, for a city with a metropolitan population of 1.5 million, Austin seems a little short in per-capita art culture. Seriously, Fort Worth, home to 50,000 less people, has us beat cold with the Kimball, the Modern Art Museum and the Amon Carter.

“There are gallery spaces and opportunities for young artists all over the place in Austin, but not for professional, long-term artists,” Attwell said. “To be a successful artist in the world today, you have to be as creative at how you market your art as you are in creating it. It’s not a matter of just doing the art; it’s getting it out there on the Internet, at house parties and in coffee shops. Survival comes from thinking outside the box.”

Attwell is an artist able to express herself in many mediums. She is a talented painter, sculptor, illustrator and muralist. She is also making a name for herself in a growing genre – environmental art, the merging of art and habitat. It’s not surprising that someone as creative as Atwell would also be talented at thinking outside that box in getting art from the hands of the Austin artists to the world.

As she headed back to her Lake Hills home, Attwell passed by Laura’s Library, picturesquely perched on a hill and ablaze with lights in the dark night. The library set off a light of another kind in Atwell’s mind.

“I looked up at the library, and I thought, ‘We need a gallery in there,’” she said. “The Westbank is full of professional artists – incredibly talented people with very few options to exhibit their work.”

Anyone who has an office, a home for sale, vacation house or four walls and a roof has gallery space, Attwell said. Expanding art past traditional gallery space is good for the public that gets more opportunity to view it, and it’s good for the art.

“When you integrate art with general culture in a coffee shop or book store, then you break down the false stigma that art is elitist, that it is reserved for the privileged,” she said. “Art can get to where it seems elitist very fast. That’s wrong. Art itself is anti-elitist. It’s human. Putting art in non-traditional places that people can bump up against everyday is a good move.”

The Scott Thornton Commons community room at Laura’s Library seemed a perfect candidate for non-traditional gallery space to Attwell. One of its walls is made of glass, providing a panoramic view of the Austin Hill Country at its most beautiful. The other three walls are blank white and perfect as hanging space for art. At least, that’s what Attwell thought. Fortunately, branch manager for Laura’s Library Lisa Charbonnet and Westbank Community Library director Beth Fox agreed.

“We had been talking about art at Laura’s Library well before Barbara entered the picture, but the art committee came about as a marvelous and fortuitous confluence of her leadership, local talent, community desire, and, at last, the right space,” Charbonnet said.

With the help of friends and fellow Westbank artists – portrait painter Katie Nail, neon artist Ben Livingston and clay artist Claudia Reese – Attwell formed a selection committee and began looking at the works of local artists. Money for the hanging system to display artwork on the library walls came from Attwell’s pocket.

The new gallery space at Laura’s Library kicked off in December with its first featured artist, director of the Nancy Wilson Scanlan Gallery at St. Stephen’s Episcopal School, Beatrice Baldwin. She is followed by artist printmaker Katherine Brimberry and large-scale photography and print artist Ryan Paul.

Each of the artists displayed at Laura’s Library have to reside in the library district and have direct ties to the Westbank community.

“We are grateful for Barbara’s kindness, her leadership, and her dogged dedication to local artists and our community,” Charbonnet said. “She has been the heart of Art at Laura’s Library; she has organized, cajoled, selected, bought and hammered in the hanging system, raised funds, hung shows, and spearheaded the art committee, all with enormous grace and a smile on her face.”

With the gallery space at the library off to a healthy start, Attwell can turn her attention back to her own art and her work to educate the public about the beauty and sanctity of nature. She teaches environmental education at Jacob’s Well, an artesian spring near Wimberley.

Attwell’s art and her love of the outdoors come together in many ways. The home she and her husband, Sam Ritter, designed in Lake Hills has tiny habitats built in for the creatures that were there before them. “As we take things away from the environment to build, we need to remember to add things back in,” she said. “My dream would be to have every new building have habitats built back in.”

One of Attwell’s current projects is a 27-foot bat house under construction in her backyard. She is deep into research on green cemeteries that can double as wildlife sanctuaries.

“I will always do environmental work; it’s needed and very therapeutic,” she said. “We have all gotten so removed from nature and that feeling of being connected. Nobody knows how to read the land anymore, how to live on it and enjoy it. The movement to get nature back into our art can close the space between nature in art and nature in people”