Marion County has a wealth of artistic talent. Much of that talent lies within women who live, work and display their art locally.
Julia Eves
Julia Eves has a studio at 619 Center Ave. in Columbia. Someone driving by might not realize it because the door simply reads, "Art Studio." Eves said she has not had an inspiration to give the studio a proper name yet. However, there is a lot going on inside that space, including Eves' current work on two pieces for the Children's Hospital that will be placed in the coastal section.
She said she opened the studio when she ran out of room at home. She does a lot of shipping and pickups. She had a piece picked up recently by Alabama Studio Designs. She uses the studio as a promotional tool as well, taking video reels and posting them.
Eves is a licensed artist who is contracted with a publishing company that makes prints to be sold at places like TJ Maxx and Home Goods. She also sells her work on Etsy and Instagram. She said she makes most of her sales on social media and has about 20,000 followers. The modern folk artist said it takes a lot of consistency to build followers.
Using mostly acrylic and mixed media in her art, Eves loves delivering bright, happy art. She is currently working on Christmas ornaments to take to Thomley's Christmas Tree Farm in Hattiesburg to sell.
Eves is married to Marion County native David Speights and became a full-time artist after moving here nine years ago from Mandeville, La. She said she loves living down Columbia-Purvis Road with her horses, dogs and land to go with the chickens on her front porch.
Donna Talerico
Donna Talerico creates art with batik, watercolors and oil paints, and she mostly does realistic works. She started painting at age 8 and has painted all of her life. She was mentored by local artist Marion Eisworth, who she helped teach at Columbia Training School.
She recently had a painting of a New Orleans street car that was auctioned off for $500 and has donated another to benefit the Children's Cancer Group. Talerico has pieces at Artwistic Revolution.
Talerico has taught art workshops all over in places such as Anaheim, Tampa, Wichita and Houston.
Talerico was born in Jackson but was raised in Columbia by her grandparents. She graduated from Covington Boarding School in Louisiana. Talerico moved to Dallas, Texas in 1973 and met her husband there. She lived in Dallas for about 45 years before coming back to Columbia in 2013, a year after her husband passed away in Lafayette, La. She had a grandson here and now has great-grandchildren here.
She said she came back to Columbia to live in her camper awhile and fish at Lake Columbia, but she will not leave Columbia because she has found a church family that has "loved her into them."
"I love my church family. They were very vital when I first came here. I only came to visit. They are the reason I stayed. That and teaching. My first love is God, then my church family and art," she said.
She does grief therapy and teaches free art classes at The Chapel of the Cross every Wednesday from 9 a.m. until 3 p.m.
Carol Durham
Carol Durham is a local artist, but most know her as the curator of the Marion County Museum & Archives, a position she has held since 2019.
Durham was raised mostly in Columbia and graduated from Columbia High School. Her mother was from here, and Durham moved here in 1958.
Durham's main medium is watercolor, which she began using in high school with no art classes under her belt. A professor from Mississippi College did a workshop in Columbia, and local artist Marion Eisworth got Durham to help organize it so she was able to attend. The professor was so impressed that he recruited her to attend Mississippi College, where she earned her art degree.
After college, she worked for Crayola, LLC, giving lectures and demonstrations about their materials to students and teachers in art departments all over the country. She has lived and worked in Atlanta and San Francisco. She hand painted fabrics in Denver and was a makeup artist in New York, as well as a graphic designer for the Mass Transit Authority. She has been to Africa and worked at The Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee.
Durham thought she would never come back to Mississippi unless it was to the Gulf Coast, but then Katrina hit, so she decided maybe the Coast wasn't the best choice. She did move back to Columbia about six years ago, and the town is grateful for that. She taught art classes at Artwistic Revolution for a while until Covid hit. Now, she is busy with her own art and the museum, a part-time job that has more like full-time hours, which is a labor of love for her.
Melissa Hedge
Melissa Hedge did not start painting until about three years ago when she had to have hip surgery. She needed something to do, so she tried painting. As a child, she only drew. She refused to paint and focused on drawing. She was self-taught and used intro to drawing and intro to drawing faces books. Hedge said she almost failed art in high school because she wouldn't do any assignments that weren't drawing.
Now, she sees how it is all connected. She started decorating cakes and making edible sculptures, which is when she actually began to put some color in her work. Cottage food laws at the time kept her from focusing on cakes. She attributes the fine details in her work to the decades of pencil drawing. She now only uses thin line brushes that mimic the pencils, which makes a painting take much longer to complete. She said her average painting takes more than 150 hours.
When she did try painting, she used a 15 year-old canvas her mom had bought her long ago. She began by lying on the edge of the bed and leaning over to paint.
"My mom, who is really honest, told me not to stop painting. I started so suddenly that I thought it would stop one day, but I kept going," she said.
She was about to quit painting when the art gallery here contacted her about displaying her work. Now, she also does ornaments and puzzles. Her ornaments are all sea creatures, and each year she chooses one to benefit a non-profit with the sales. This year, the ornament is the sea turtle, and the non-profit is the National Military Families Association. She has prints for sale that are produced in Virginia.
She started painting with acrylics but also uses oils. The medium she uses depends on what she is doing. When she sells a painting, it comes with a description of why she painted it and the meaning behind it. She said she pulls from life experiences. Her family bred pugs so she paints pugs. Her father is obsessed with turtles so she paints turtles. Hedge said she cannot paint landscapes because she has ADHD, and landscapes have way too much information to process at once. She paints a specific thing and shows it in its best light.
Hedge is originally from Virginia but has also lived in Kansas, Georgia and Texas.
Hedge moved to Hattiesburg about three years ago when her husband, David, was stationed at Camp Shelby. He got orders to go to El Paso, Texas, but was deployed to Korea. So Hedge and their sons, Owen, Jameson and Mason, stayed in Mississippi. Hedge said that they will remain in the state even after her husband returns to El Paso. He will join them here when he can. She said Mississippi is the only option of where they would stay. She comes to Columbia several times a week to work at the gallery.
"Everything that went wrong essentially got me to here in work and in life. We never thought we'd live here or that we'd love it, but we found that we do love it," Hedge said.
Renee Timmons
Renee Timmons is a respiratory therapist and loves that more than anything, but she also loves creating art from all sorts of materials.
She began as an artist making and selling crochet pieces. She said she would make just enough to have money to buy materials. She crocheted, sewed and tried anything that she saw and felt, "Oh, I want to do that." She would keep small items in lab coat packets at her job and sell to people from them.
She also does framing because she couldn't afford to pay to get things framed. She learned from Dutharene of Dutharene's Frame Connection and started doing framing for everybody at the hospital.
Timmons began working with glass about 15 years ago by playing with it. She makes wind chimes and Christmas ornaments. She stresses that types of glass cannot be mixed.
"It's amazing what I can do with a wine bottle. You can do anything you can imagine if you think hard enough," Timmons said.
She is taking acrylic classes from Raymond Mathews and has taken classes from Tasha Williams at Art Cetera. She has pieces displayed at both Artwistic Revolution and Art Cetera.
Her newest art form she is working with is alcohol ink. It comes in a bottle and spreads when you pour it on paper. She then takes a straw and blows it into the groovy, cool designs she wants.
Timmons was born in North Dakota and grew up in Iowa. She has lived in Kokomo for 43 years after meeting and marrying her husband, Michael Timmons, in Wyoming. Michael was from here, and all of their grandchildren are now in a five-mile radius, along with his mother.
"I love Kokomo. There's no hustle. There's no bustle. The deer are my friends. The quail are so fat from my feeding them that they look stuffed," she said.
