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For three months, as she prepared for this weekend's show, Hillary Weber's Chicago apartment was a swirling chaos of works in progress.

Paintings hung from closet doors and on every wall. They sat on easels and on the floor, propped against furniture.

With brushes in hand, Weber stared at her paintings.

"For three months, I did a lot of working and sitting and looking and thinking about each piece," she said. "I can't tell you how much time I just spent looking."

All the paintings were happening at once. She would add some shapes and lines to this one or a fish shape to another one.

The process would go on and on, she said. "Then there would be this moment. I can't describe it. I would just know (the painting) was done."

Weber's work keeps the viewer moving back and forth between a contemplation of a formal abstract color study and a feeling that you are reading the pages of a children's book.

The reoccurring shape of a stylized fish -- drawn as a simple silhouette -- brings you immediately into the painting and makes the otherwise unfamiliar compositions a comfortable place to explore.

Weber can't explain why she keeps putting fish (or fish shapes) in almost every one of her paintings. She doesn't fish and didn't before she started painting fish.

"I started painting fish, and I can't stop painting fish," she said. "I just always toss in that shape."

Weber's work is a process of addition and subtraction. She starts with a shape or a color or a fish. Working with fast-drying acrylics allows her to block out whole areas, adding and subtracting arbitrary lines until the painting is done.

"Things get erased and come back," she said.

Weber also has been experimenting with oil sticks and mixed media additions such as the contour drawings of fishing trip photographs she added to the surface of the piece titled "25 inch" or the pieces of fishing tackle and copper wire she added to "Three Fish."

She gathers inspiration from things such as the ladder that led into the water at her family's lake house or the way the light comes through the windows of her studio and moves across the walls.

Comb Goddess owner Sydney Craig saw slides of Hillary Weber's work two years ago through her brother, Steamboat Springs resident Brad Weber, and invited her to do a show. The show will be Comb Goddess' first art show featuring an out-of-town artist.

This is Hillary Weber's first one-person show and the first show since she quit her job as a graphic designer to, among other things, concentrate on her artwork.

At 32, Weber has been working at a computer since she graduated from the University of Illinois 10 years ago. Painting was always something she did for fun, but working pushed her canvases further and further toward the back burner.

Since quitting her job, Weber has enough freelance design work coming in to make a living, but enough free time to focus on her art.

"It's such a luxury to be able to devote whole days to painting," she said.