TAHLEQUAH — Painting the wood trim on cars at age 14 led Mary Barton Wilcox to a sign-painting job for Largo Freight Co. in California. She’d been painting store fronts, too, when a man walked up and asked her if she could paint a sign for him.

“I’ve always painted roses; even a bouquet always has a rose in it,” Wilcox said.

In 1973, a blind man asked her to paint a rose on velvet so he could feel it. That’s when she began to develop her own technique of pushing the paint to the edge of each petal.

Wilcox is self-taught, and she still paints every day at age 71.

“I don’t knit, but I can paint, sometimes more than 10 hours a day,” she said. “You have to have at least 40 paintings to have a good show. I’m a very prolific painter. It always makes me feel good, and I want to be productive.”

Roses are her inspiration, but she paints landscapes, eagles, hawks and portraits as well.

“The Oklahoma landscape is so rugged – not perfect, but a challenge to artists,” she said.

Oil is her preferred medium.

“There’s something about oil paints, the texture and how it glides, mixing it and paying attention to color,” she said. “It’s very therapeutic.”

Now retired and living in Locust Grove since 2003, she was born in Muskogee and grew up in California. As evangelists, she and husband Wayne eventually took a pastorate in New York, where they lived for 30 years.

While on the road for nearly three years, she did a puppet show with arm puppets like the Muppets.

Between travels as an evangelist and friends and family, her roses are all over the United States – “thousands of them by now.”

“I used to paint 15-minute oil paintings when we were evangelists,” Wilcox said.

A recent show in Tulsa for the Rose Society garnered good comments and sales, she said.

“I listen to people’s comments and take it to heart. When someone said my petals were too rounded, I took that constructive comment and worked on my rose petals,” she said.

“Rainbow Fragrance” featured roses and leaves of many colors, and she donated it to the Rose Society.

“I paint all shades of roses you have never seen, purples and blues and leaves, too,” she said.

While in New York, she taught several art classes at the School of Arts in Lancaster. She discovered what techniques worked for her didn’t always work for others.

“You have to have depth, by putting layers on and bring it forward from the background up,” Wilcox said. “You paint the last petal first and bring it back to front.”

And she discovered, “the brush and colors come from deep within me somewhere.”

“If [the artist] doesn’t have that ‘keep place,’ they can’t do it. They have to paint and create from within themselves using their own thoughts,” she said. “You can’t make someone paint a painting like you.”

Over time, her paintings have gotten better.

“I’m just now getting the real hang of it; I’m faster and better,” she said.

Her trademark is a drop of water on a rose.

“I never push my paintings; they push themselves,” Wilcox said.

Her next show will be at the Pryor Library in conjunction with her book-signing for “First Rose,” book about life after death, inspired by the first rose of spring (see related story on page 1A).

When she retired in 1971 as a registered nurse, she became an ordained minister. Christian counseling and psychotherapy led her to stories of near-death experiences, which she documented.

“Seventh-, eighth- and ninth-graders are a lot of my readers. They’re being told there’s nothing after death and this gives them hope,” she said.

It’s foolish to throw away everything people have seen after near-death experiences, Wilcox added.

“First Rose” is the journey of Rose through the celestial city of New Salem, who returns to tell of the angels, flowers, animals, and loved ones she encounters.