How I Came To Know
I was born Gretchen Lizzette Rosario Artau Natal in sunny, colorful San Juan, Puerto Rico. As an only child, with one mother and one grandmother, I was uprooted and transplanted into the gray-filtered light and rugged skylines of the Pacific Northwest.
For many years, I stood out like a lime-green thumb, until I discovered I wasn't the wrong color palette at all. I simply had to step into my own limelight. That journey eventually led me to create Devine Color—"Color Therapy From The Northwest"—a cult paint brand later acquired by Sherwin-Williams.
But I came to this work, not through therapy or a doctorate, and not through a calling. I wasn't particularly gifted at art. I came to it through a bucket of paint. Changing the colors of my own home, I realized color wasn't helping me decorate my life. It was helping me belong to it.
I built a life of beauty and belonging, then shared what I had come to know by helping others do the same. That's how I belonged, became, and bore a life of shared dreams. What started as my personal need to belong with a bucket of paint turned into a discovery of human "knowing" as shared, rooted, and interconnected needs. I call it a trilogy of belonging, becoming, and bearing what we share.
My hope isn't that you'll follow my path. It's that through my stories, you'll begin to recognize your own.