Creating soul deep art: Lea Barton proves that Mississippi is full of beauty and creativity that is yet to be expressed.

Lea Barton is the picture of hip Southern hospitality in her pink "Mississippi Girl" ball cap and neatly untucked layered look.

Quick with ready laughter, she offers a soft drink and a tour of her immaculate metal-trimmed art studio framed by hardwoods in the Flora countryside.

Then I see her artwork. Her mixed-media paintings show the mind and soul and heart of a woman seeking answers about our Mississippi and our South that she may never find.

But that's fine with this visual artist.

The important thing, she says, is that she is seeking the reality and truth and hope beneath the self-inflicted wounds Southerners have endured.

"In some ways, when you see my art, you see me," she says.

Those who appreciate excellence in the fine arts affirm her work. Barton is represented by Denise Bibro Fine Art in New York. She has exhibited at the Pratt Institute in New York, and at galleries across the South, including the Cole Pratt Gallery in New Orleans, the Perry Nicole Gallery in Memphis, the M2 Gallery in Little Rock, and the Mississippi Museum of Art, among others.

Mississippi author Ellen Douglas has called Barton's work "deeply rooted in her life in the South--the South with all its moral complexity past and present, its tragedy and comedy and beauty."

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Spend a few moments with Lea and you realize she is soaking up life everywhere she finds it. And she's not letting go of much of it: nothing goes to waste in her work. She shows me a flat file with drawer after drawer of old wallpaper and wood stamps and photos, even scraps of prints made from her previous work.

She has mixed together the South's laughter and pathos big and small, producing pieces of art both striking and stricken. Vivacious and friendly as she might be, she's not the type of Southern belle who is afraid to face the occasional shadows beneath our Southern smiles. In a way, that's what Lea Barton has done with her life: she has used every peak and valley to create a life collage of creativity.

Her father was a good man who cared for his family. "He knew his two sons were going to college but he had no idea what to do with a strong-willed, driven daughter," says Lea. A Raymond native, he joined the Navy and carted his family all over the nation for 15 years. During the summers, little Lea would visit her grandparents at Wolf Lake outside Yazoo City. At their store, she would watch the field workers come in for a treat. One day, Lea pointed at a young girl with bits of cotton stuck in her pigtails. "I want my hair done like that," she proclaimed. She was quickly herded away--but the impressions of that day stuck have with her ever since.

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"I never knew that little girl's name, but I'll never forget her," says Lea. An image of a young African-American girl appears in several of Lea's pieces.

Childhood rolled on. Lea released her creativity by collaging her closet door or creating a beaded entrance for her bedroom. But that was just fun stuff. Not practical. Not anything on which to build a life. Girls grew up and worked or got married, or both.

The family settled back in Raymond in time for Lea to attend high school. She excelled at typing and the secretarial disciplines, which was fine with her daddy. Lea won awards in Future Business Leaders competitions. You'd make a great paralegal, she was told. So her father bribed her: An almost-new car in exchange for her promise to go straight into the work force. Which she did, telling herself she could come back to her art later.

Years passed, and as predicted, she was an excellent paralegal. But she yearned to create, but was she good enough?

Finally, in her mid-thirties, Lea decided to go for it. Her plan was to go to college after a year of marriage. Her husband, attorney Ken Barton, stepped in with a seldom-heard message. "Look, we're grown-ups. We don't need a year to decide if this is right for you. lust quit work and go back to school." She immediately enrolled in the adult degree program at Millsaps College, majoring in art. She flourished.

But she did not stop there. After graduation, she was accepted into the master's program at the Pratt Institute, a prestigious art program in Brooklyn, New York. It would mean weeks of separation from her husband but, again, he encouraged her. She specialized in printmaking. "In New York, I was continually asked to tell about the South. I began to read the great Southern writers. It influenced my work."

In her spare time, she embarked on a project of her own. She began putting images, textures, and verbiage into a mixed media piece on a five-by-six-foot canvas that revealed the South in ways previously unrealized. "I had moved around so much, and just came in and out of the South when I lived in Yazoo during the summers. This piece spoke about the South that I had ignored and rebelled against and had taken for granted all those years." Toe result was "Mother and Child," a multi-layered visual patchwork of the South, featuring everything from Elvis to a Mississippi license plate, and dozens of other images.

With her mixed-media paintings, Lea had taken immense steps toward releasing herself to create great art. Critics took notice of her work favorably. Her commentary on the South and women was appreciated by galleries.

Her technique involves the use of acrylic and oil paint, printmaking, collage, and sometimes three-dimensional objects to build the surface of the paintings. She layers materials as diverse as old love letters and wallpaper from abandoned sharecropper huts to photographs and vintage dress patterns, all of which are neatly collected in her studio. Since the creation of "Mother and Child" in the late 1990s, Lea has gone on to create dozens of pieces.

Today, Lea continues to create art in her gallery amid the trees of Flora. She also inspires and teaches others to achieve their artistic dreams. She has been a guest speaker at schools and universities throughout Mississippi.

"I want to reach people through my art and encourage them to create their own," says Lea. "Mississippi is full of beauty and creativity that is yet to be expressed."