Janie Polselli is artist-in-residence at her own home.

The 65-year-old Taft, Tennessee, native built the wooden three-room house she lives in off Oakland Meadows Road in northeastern Limestone County. She grows her own vegetables and makes folk art pieces all day long.

Her latest work is a set of murals done in acrylic paint on the four walls of her cement storm cellar.

“It was just plain black and somebody suggested that I should paint it,” Polselli said. “And I got out here one day and I just kept painting.”

As suggested by one of her 11 sisters, Polselli began with a mule pulling a cart. The cart began to fill up with cotton ready for the gin and Polselli’s sister Patsy took the mule’s reins.

The simple vignette slowly morphed into a scene straight out of Polselli’s childhood.

“I took my time,” she said. “I’d come out early in the mornings and I would just play with it and sometimes I didn’t like it and I’d redo it. I come out here and I’ll sit in my chair and I’ll do around a little bit.”

She painted her parents, all 11 of her sisters and her one brother. She placed them around the well and in the pasture of their home, surrounded by the church, the school and the old country store she frequented as a child.

“That was us,” she said. “That’s where we lived and a little outhouse, and the well and the barn.”

The artwork is striking enough that passersby will stop in the middle of the road to admire Polselli’s handiwork.

“They stop and back up, especially if I’m out here painting,” she said. “People will come out here when I’m here, people will come by and stop and they’ll ask me what that’s all about and I tell them.”

She covered the back wall with flowers of every color imaginable and the remaining walls she painted to appear as if they had windows.

Polselli said she plans to remove the window scene from the front wall facing the road in favor of another set of portraits.

“I’m proud of it, I really am,” she said.

Polselli literally topped the piece with a faux roof in the same style as the one on her house. It covers the plain cement roof that protects the storm shelter.

The murals provide a starting point in the Polselli gallery. Her garden is resplendent with found objects she or friends have transformed into garden critters or over-size insects. An Athens friend gave her wood from a tree destroyed in the April 28 tornado that Polselli turned into watermelon slices.

Visitors making their way up to the house may only see three rooms and two simple porches, but a closer inspection shows more folk art treasures.

“It’s unique, it really is,” she said. “It’s all about old pictures and family and friends and just things that I love. Things that I like, I surround myself with.”