OZARK FOOTHILLS CAPTURED ON CANVAS

The kitchen in Vickie Rhodes' home doubles as a workshop for aspiring artists. Rhodes teaches painting classes there. From the left are Fran Mayberry, Ruby Deckard and Rhodes.

Surrounded by examples of her art, to include hand-painted saw blades, Vickie Rhodes holds a painting that is "alive" with color. She uses lots of paint to achieve rich textures.

The tiny town of Zalma in Bollinger County is becoming something of an enclave for aspiring artists.

Vickie Rhodes, who manages the 51 Stop convenience store on Highway 51 there, is also teaching painting to about 20 area residents. And she teaches out of the kitchen at her business.

"The kitchen is also the workshop right now," said Rhodes, who was born in St. Louis and moved to Zalma in 1988. "I hope to open a studio next door, maybe in February."

Class times are flexible. Up to four people can attend at a time and they can arrive at 10 a.m. "and stay until they've finished a picture. Everyone goes home with a finished picture."

As Rhodes teaches about technique, color and texture, she also tends to customers who want to buy milk, beer or rent a VCR movie. "I go back and forth a lot," she said, smiling. Sometimes, a helper will watch the store while she's busy.

Rhodes, who started painting in high school and liked it so much she skipped study hall to practice in art rooms, admits there is room for improvement in her endeavor.

She has attended classes, and when she sees paintings she admires she attempts to contact the painters to pick up pointers.

At a class taught at Hobby Lobby in Cape Girardeau, she learned the painting technique of Bob Ross, who teaches his art on TV, on public broadcasting channels.

He teaches 'wet on wet,'" said Rhodes, reaching for brush to dab into a blot of blue paint. "Canvas is dry, and he does 'jesso' -- that's using white, even black paint to cover the canvas so the other paints brushed on slide easier. It gives all kinds of neat effects."

For 12 years after high school her brushes rarely touched palette -- she was busy raising two children. But now she's splashing paint with the best of them.

Her oil paintings are on show in her store and are for sale. "I just had them out for display when people started asking me if I'd sell them. I said, 'Of course,' although I didn't think they were good enough to sell."

Three of her pictures -- she concentrates on extremely colorful landscapes, although she also does portraits and wildlife -- are part of the Art for the Health of It exhibit at Southeast Hospital.

Sponsored by the Council on the Arts, the exhibit is meant to make visitors with relatives and friends in the hospital feel better.

Earlier this month she and her students held an art fair in Zalma. Their paintings were displayed in a popular downtown business.

Rhodes favors painting on canvas tacked to 16-by-20-inch wood frames. She says that size is easy to handle and more fun to work with. But she also paints on wood such as bread boxes -- and she paints on saw blades.

"People just give them to me," she said of the saw blades. "I usually get the small round ones, like on a Skillsaw, but I've also been given the big ones from the sawmills.

"I'm about to start painting one that's about 2 feet tall."

She said a teacher from a Zalma school asked her to paint a long, sharp-toothed saw with handles at either end -- the kind of saw two men would use to fell large trees years ago. The teacher gave her a photo of his farm to recreate on the saw.

Rhodes can paint a picture drawing on her imagination, but she prefers to have a subject. Recently, she went to a trail ride, set up her easel and painted the riders. Sometimes she'll set up in the woods and capture on canvas a breathtaking landscape.

"And I paint a lot from pictures," said Rhodes, reaching for a stack of art books. "I look at calendars and greeting cards for ideas. I might see a picture I like on a box or in a magazine."

Rhodes calls her painting technique impressionistic. She uses "lots of paint" to give her creations depth and rich texture. She likes bright, vivid colors.

"I try to paint so that people look at my paintings and go, "Wow, this looks like fireworks,'" she said, pointing to a landscape peppered with red, orange, green, yellow and blue trees against a lavender background.

"I've talked to truck drivers who tell me there are those colors of trees in certain parts of this country. I just put them all together and added a little water fall."

Rhodes can create a painting in as little as half an hour, and some take about two hours to do depending on how much detail she wants.

She says she hasn't yet profited much from her born-again art, but she's gaining confidence -- she recently ordered business cards.