“My first painting – and I still have it at home – was on a piece of plywood, and I could only afford a black and a white (paint). So I made a bull rider in black and white. I paid one woman to teach me to paint. She looked at my painting and said, ‘You got darn good brush strokes.’ I went home and started painting and didn’t pay another one,” Walker said.

Before long, Walker accumulated around 25 paintings, filling up her home. While she initially began painting for her own enjoyment and made some commissioned works, Walker said she began to wonder what would happen to her paintings after she passed on.

“One of my children likes my paintings. The rest of them (think) I’m wasting my time and my money. I didn’t want to see them go and just get thrown away,” Walker said. “So I went to the flea market in October and just set them down.”

Despite her trepidations with offering her works to the public, Walker’s paintings quickly attracted attention.

“I’m sitting there with this guy and he is looking at a painting of a lady that’s got all these feathers and gorgeous colors. I said, ‘Do you want to know the story behind that?’ and he said ‘yeah.’ I told him that, and he said, ‘I’m buying this for the story,'” Walker said. “After that I started telling them why I painted them. Now my paintings are going out to people who want them, and they’re not going to a place where nobody wants them.”

In the time since Walker started selling her works at the Minot Flea Market and at a booth in Dakota Square Mall, she has produced and sold more than 90 paintings to passersby. Walker said her paintings have been particularly appealing to young children.

“Basically, I painted them and started selling them so my son wouldn’t have to get rid of them, and maybe the children would appreciate them more. They seem to like all the colors. It really has made my son more open to it, because people love them,” Walker said. “Mainly, the people like the memories and stories that go with them.”

One such story inspired a painting of a cabin on a mountain near Sun Valley, Idaho, where she and her husband would stay while driving cattle.

“We lived in a cabin like that. One day I was sitting in a recliner. Charles was out with the cattle, and a flickertail came in, and he was eating my dog food. He left after he filled his little jaws up and I put a couple saddle blankets over it. He came back and he told me off. He had a heck of a conversation. I told him, ‘Forget it. I’m not feeding you,'” Walker said. “Pretty quick he came back in and jumped up on the arm of my chair. We’re in the wild. We’re not in a park in New York or here. Then he went on my knee, and he gave me every word in his language that I should open up the dog food or else. I got up and opened that up. It actually reasoned that I had shut it up and that he could come and tell me what to do. It still makes me shiver when I think of it.”

Other paintings were inspired by trips she took with her husband and by pets she raised in her youth.

Walker said she makes enough from her sales to replenish her painting supplies. She hopes that her experiences will inspire other local artists to open up and share their works with the community.

“I know a lot of people who paint who wind up just filling up a closet. I’ve gained back a hundred for every one who sits and talks to me. Because everyone who I tell a story to, tells me a story and lets themselves open up.This one woman who picked up a butterfly painting, and as a child she raised a butterfly. They give you something back,” Walker said. “This way, after I’m gone, my son can take them down, and everyone will have a painting. They’ll be in all these different people’s homes, and they’ll remember that crazy old lady.”