UTICA — “I’ve always doodled,” Eugenia Martin said. “I’ve got old doodle books.”

Her childhood doodling that became a hobby has evolved into a profession, for she spends much of her time with paints, brushes and pallets. Her Main Street home in this southwestern Hinds County town is also her studio. She shares it with her husband, Will Roy Martin Jr., and several cats.

Eugenia grew up in Birmingham and drew and painted her way through school, “much to the despair of my parents,” for every book report, science project and anything else was accompanied by her artistic talent.

For information

Eugenia Martin’s studio is at 513 W. Main St. in Utica. She can be reached by phone at 601-885-2343 or e-mail. She also has a blog.

Once out of school, she worked for a time at the Alabama Dental School, then moved to Mississippi, to Pearl. She made numerous friends, “so I ended up staying — and marrying the boy next door.” They’ve been married almost 14 years, “but have been friends a lot longer. We really did live next door to one another for six or seven years, and when I got sick he’d come over and give me chicken soup. I figured if he had seen me at the worst possible, and he was still around, he was a keeper.”

They had many of the same interests — photography, bird watching, plants, “and he likes to cook. He’s a much better cook than I am, but I help him. At least he knew what flowers were. My dad didn’t know a weed from a flower.”

Eugenia made at least two moves, each tied to a tragedy, before settling in Utica two years ago. First was the Easter flood of 1978 when someone knocked on her door one Sunday morning with a warning to leave. The most recent was brought about by a hurricane.

“We’re here as a trickle-down result of Katrina,” she said. The house where they lived in Jackson was owned by a lady from the Coast who lost everything and needed to sell the Jackson residence.

Will Roy grew up in Utica where his mother, sister and other relatives live, so they bought a 1940s house “as is.” She was in school at Hinds, about to graduate, and had to find a house and move within a month, and the move “was a nightmare. I figured if I could survive that I could survive anything, but it all worked out.”

“I always wanted to paint,” she said, and about 20 years ago she took lessons from David Burkett in Jackson, attending a once-a-week class at night for four years, “painting what you see around here on the walls. They’re 20 years old.” The death of her instructor, plus long hours at her job, put her painting on hold until just a few years ago when she enrolled in art classes at Hinds Community College.

Her favorite medium is oils, though she also paints in acrylics and water color, and does pen and ink drawings. She considers her art “realistic instead of abstract or that sort of thing. Not photo realism. When you look at it, I want you to know what it is.” She leans toward impressionistic, “and I try to start out loose, but I end up tightening up so most of my pieces show real detail.”

Portraits, she said, are not her thing, not even wanting to do the art-class-required self-portrait because “I didn’t want to look at me. What is a good side?” She does better with animals, she said, “because they don’t talk back.”

Her portfolio and her walls include paintings and graphic designs of just about any subject including still lifes, pastoral scenes, houses, wildlife — whatever strikes her fancy, or whatever someone wants.

She’s working on several commissions and has paintings at Peterson’s in Vicksburg.

Eugenia works from photos, from sketches, and “sometimes (I) just have to make it up,” such as a painting she did based on “The Wizard of Oz.” She calls herself “a city girl. I freak out at a spider,” and she’s had to get used to raccoons coming to the porch, looking for food.

She has a fondness for blue herons, egrets and hawks and is looking for a photo of a fox. She recently had a commission for a squirrel on a rock which she said “was easy. You just have to find the right rock and look at it and think ‘What does it look like?’”

She wants to paint sand hill cranes and even has a name for the piece — “‘Confederate Grays’ and, someday, I’ll do it.” Efforts to photograph them have failed because of dense fog.

Eugenia’s talent has not gone unnoticed. Last spring, she won first and second places in acrylics in the Vicksburg Art Association show and, while a student at Hinds, entered five paintings in statewide competition, winning four ribbons including first places in drawing and in design. Last year, she participated in the quick draw in Hattiesburg, sponsored by the South Mississippi Art Association, where everyone has to create something for auction within an hour for a benefit.

Though Utica is a small town, Eugenia has a window to the world through the Internet, a blog site and MySpace, which have made her art accessible just about everywhere. She even has pieces in a private collection in Russia.

Her husband shares many of her interests but he has one talent she doesn’t, and that’s music. “He plays lead guitar in a little garage band, I guess you’d call it — the Vanilla Wafers,” she said. “Most of my family can sing or at least carry a tune, but I’m tone deaf. They don’t know where I came from.”

Nobody else in her family, though, has artistic talents.

Gordon Cotton is an author and historian who lives in Vicksburg.