Walk into the Columbus Arts Council gallery over the next two months, and you’ll find yourself surrounded by bright, bold colors, familiar Southern landscapes and black-and-white portraits of man’s best friend.

And if you spend enough time looking at the art, you might start to see a little bit of the artist behind the canvas, the camera lens or the brushstrokes.
As Jessica Briggs, the summer Vista AmeriCorps volunteer for the CAC, put it on the night of the gallery reception: “If you pay attention to the three of them, they look like their art.”

“If you look at their attire, if you listen to their personalities when they talk, they literally reflect their art in their personalities,” she continued.

Briggs went on to emphasize that while the bodies of work could not be more different from each other – each piece seems to carry the personality, passions and perspectives of the woman who created it.

Behind the camera lens

For Lee Ann Edmonds, her love of dogs and the loss of her own best friend, a French bulldog named Lola, is what re-ignited her lifelong commitment to photography.

“I do street photography, which is more about candid documentary work of just everyday moments,” she said. “And that’s when I would walk Lola, and when she passed away, I stopped shooting that way for a while because that was what we did together, you know.”

Outside of her creative outlet of street photography, she had been mostly freelancing, taking commissions and doing paid creative work, responsibilities that often pushed her own creative work to the wayside.

“Part of the reason this series came about was because I was healing during my loss of Lola,” she said. “I started really photographing dogs back in 2023 when I noticed I was mourning the loss of my dog, and that’s how I was able to connect with other dog owners who understood what I was going through, and just sort of grow.”

When asked about her favorite piece, Edmonds hesitated as she considered her collection of work. She said choosing her favorite piece is difficult because many of her photographs are tied to personal memories.

“Probably the ‘Bored Bar Dog’ or ‘Rio Looking Out the Window,’” Edmonds said. “And then the earliest beginning work of the boxer, because that’s when I was a photographer in training and I was trying to discover who I was as a photographer.”

The photo of the boxer shows a curious, cropped-ear boxer curiously peering over a fence. Though the work was taken over 20 years ago, it fits in seamlessly with her modern work — something Edmonds said has affirmed her artistic voice.

“Your work eventually comes out through pattern and repetition and subconsciously, and you realize all along it was right in front of you, but you tried everything,” Edmonds said.

Looking back at her earlier work, including the photo of the boxer dog, Edmonds said she wishes she had trusted her instincts sooner – but she acknowledged it was not too late to keep creating work that she feels truly represents her.

“If I’d have listened to my intuition in 2004, I would have probably had even a larger series,” she said. “But when you’re a young artist or young student or whatever, you try to fit the mold of what people expect of you, regardless of if it’s what you really want to do … But making the decision to step back from free lance has given me so much of my creativity back.”

In her artist statement, Edmonds said she wants her photos of “the individual personality of dogs and the unpredictability of dog behavior to encourage viewers to find their own connections through their personal experiences.”

According to Briggs, this is something Edmonds has nailed.

“I just love her ‘sleeping puppies’ photograph,” Briggs said. “I am not a dog person, but it just pulls me in and makes me want to be one.”

Behind the palette knife

When self-taught acrylic artist Leigh Ann Merkl began painting, she experimented with different styles before discovering a technique that felt natural. After a long career as a horticulturist and ornamental garden designer in Texas, she felt ready to create in a new way after moving to Mississippi about 10 years ago. It took a few tries, but then she had her “aha!” moment.

“The palette knife gives me a lot more flexibility,” Merkl said. “It really lends itself to texture and to layer. I can’t put my finger on it, and I’m not even that comfortable with a brush still because I usually just end up trying to dig a hole through the painting, but I connected so much with this method.”
After completing her first piece using the technique, she knew she had found something special.

“I sat back and thought, ‘Wow, I love what I’ve made here,’” Merkl said. “It was like, ‘I’m a painter.’”

Since then, she has embraced the process and the joy that comes with it. Her work is an explosion of colors, but somehow gazing upon the vibrancy of her work doesn’t feel overwhelming. It feels right, like each hue of warm pink, bright yellow and crystal-clear aqua simply belong together.

Her favorite work in the show is a piece called “Dreamer,” a portrait of a girl cupping her face in her hands, a far-off look in her eyes, flowers piled onto her hair creating a crown.

“That one is different. I had never tried a stencil technique before, but all of her hair are layered stencils,” she said. “The piece is so layered because you have to let each layer dry in between.”

A lot of her work requires a high level of patience as she works with her knife to build color and shape. Some paintings can take several weeks, she said. But she keeps several works ongoing so that she can always have something to work on.

In her collection are dozens of small paintings, each in her vibrant color scale, but with an emphasis on her horticultural design skills.

“They remind me so much of my garden design days,” Merkl said. “I’ll be painting and say, ‘Oh, this would be a good place for celosia, and let’s put this mandevilla here.’”

And when she lets you in on the setting in which she creates, you can begin to imagine how these paintings come about…

“I’m having a good time in the studio, and I wasn’t joking about blasting music,” she said, referencing the introduction she gave at the reception. “It’s like a party in the studio.”

That party includes a wide range of music, from classical to rock.

“Anything from Bocelli to ZZ Top,” Merkl said.

Behind the Southern scenes

For Mary Ellen Winborn, painting Mississippi is about more than capturing a landscape. It is about reconnecting with a place she never stopped missing.

Winborn graduated from Mississippi State University with a degree in architecture and spent 23 years practicing architecture in the Pacific Northwest before returning to Mississippi four years ago.

As she and her husband came back to their original home, she said the landscape inspired her to pursue a career in oil painting, a lifelong love that she didn’t realize she had.

“I just feel like I just want to gobble up Mississippi,” Winborn said.

Although she said the Pacific Northwest was “absolutely stunningly beautiful,” Mississippi offered something different.

“The landscape’s more attainable,” she said. “That’s not the word I’m really looking for, but it’s so powerful out there. It’s almost like a postcard. I mean, cliffs and water …”

“Here it’s just accessible,” she continued. “I missed it, and I really didn’t know how much I missed it until we got back, because I never looked at it the way that I look at it now.”

You can see this love and devotion in her work. Each painting captures a landscape every Mississippian has seen before, whether they’ve been in those exact spots or not. The gently blurred landscape – often with a crisp focal point that draws you in – plays with your nostalgia and memories of the southeastern geography. It is the Mississippi of your memories.

Winborn said her paintings often begin with a moment that catches her attention – a particular light, a building or a Mississippi scene.

“Sometimes landscapes and scenes just hit me, and I can’t get it out of my mind,” Winborn said. “I just have to paint it.”

Recently, one of those landscapes was a water tower in Vaiden.

“I had been looking at it and looking at it,” she said. “I love the composition. I just love the impact of it. So sometimes things just hit me, you know, and I just can’t get it out of my mind.”

She thought about making that painting until she was able to snap a photo and get it down on a canvas. And while some paintings begin from photographs – like the water tower – Winborn often paints “en plein air” – the French technique for painting outdoors – setting up her easel wherever she finds inspiration. It’s a new-ish technique for her, started within the last year or two.

Painting this way has changed Winborn so much that she said painting from a photographic reference just doesn’t have the same challenge or appeal to her as it used to.

“There is nothing like being outdoors and experiencing the elements while trying to stay focused on a subject,” she said in her artist statement. “And while capturing sunlight that is ever changing.”

“Most of the time, like I’ll go downtown in Greenwood and just set up and paint a house if I think it’s really pretty,” she said. The Delta, she said in her artist statement, provides a lot of “flora, fauna and fabrications” to work with.

Winborn said she enjoys seeing people connect with her work, especially when a painting reminds them of their own experiences.

“One of the biggest gifts of painting is when people purchase them and put them in their home,” she said. “I just find myself so surprised and delighted each time it happens – that someone would want to put my art on their walls.”

And she said seeing people identify with her paintings and hearing what they take from it is what makes the process meaningful.

“I had one young lady come up to one of my paintings and say, ‘Oh, wow, that’s my grandma’s house.’ I tried to correct her and say, ‘Well, you know, it’s actually a bakery,’ but she immediately said, ‘No, that’s my grandma’s house,’” Winborn recalled with a laugh.

“That’s how she connected to my work,” Winborn said. “That’s what’s so special, really, the connections.”