Capturing Mountain Brook's beauty: Artist paints images along Jemison Trail

After becoming friends while attending Vanderbilt University, Erika Huddleston and Mountain Brook resident Mary Halsey Maddox’s careers diverged, but their friendship remained.

Maddox has lived in the city for 26 years and works as a physician at Children’s of Alabama, while also working remotely for Huddleston as her studio assistant. After Vanderbilt, Huddleston attended Parsons School of Design in New York, where she worked for six years, before obtaining her master’s of landscape architecture at the University of Texas at Austin. 

Huddleston recently spent several weeks in Mountain Brook working on paintings of Jemison Trail, after Maddox invited her to pay a visit to the city to paint the wooded area along Shades Creek.

“Jemison Trail is such a special place to so many people that I thought having Erika capture it would be so special to the Birmingham community,” Maddox said.

Painting along the trail

Huddleston worked on her paintings along the trail each day that the weather permitted, creating pieces at various points along Shades Creek from Cahaba Road to Overbrook Road.

“I had just come off some shows earlier this year and all the logistics fell into place for me to come,” she said. “I’ve never painted outside Texas and New York City. It was exciting.” 

However, this wasn’t Huddleston’s first trip to Mountain Brook. She grew up in Dallas and visited the city when she was 18. She remembers hiking in the very area where she was painting and the lasting impact it had on her.

“I've been to Mountain Brook before and remember being amazed by how beautiful the whole area is,” Huddleston said. “Mountain Brook has been on my heart since college. It's not a random thing.”

One of Texas Monthly's “Top Ten Artists to Collect Now,” Huddleston specializes in capturing the beauty of nature in urban settings. Other outdoor spaces she has painted include the Shoal Creek Trail in urban Austin, Texas; Waco Creek in Texas; and The Ramble in New York’s Central Park. 

Huddleston began her days along the trail around 9 a.m., making several trips to her car to carry her bags containing all of her supplies, from oil paints to powdered pigments and canvases. 

“I love all the Southern pine trees, it’s so majestic. It’s beautiful to be in a mixed forest where there’s pines, elms, redbuds — it's a full canopy and understory forest in the middle of the city,” she said. 

She planned to create 10 to 15 oil paintings in two different sizes, 16x27 inches and 30x40 inches, along various parts of the trail. 

“Each spot location will have a different painting,” she said. “I’m observing what I see and recording it on canvas, all the changes in nature. Oil painting on site allows you to stay in one spot a long time and capture things you can't put on a map very easily.”

The first spot Huddleston painted was across from the old mill, next to the house designed by Jemison to look like Mount Vernon — the first house ever built in Mountain Brook. 

While she paints, Huddleston said people always stop and speak to her. While in Mountain Brook, she said she would see people on the trail and then spot them again at restaurants or other places in the city. 

“Mountain Brook is small enough that when a stranger comes to town they see the same friendly people,” she said. 

While her work isn’t technically about advocacy, Huddleston said it “sort of is.” 

“I want to draw attention to hav[ing] publicly accessible wilderness places and parks in the city is good for everybody’s mental health,” she said.

It was evident that Huddleston had done her research on the area. She recounted how 

Robert Jemison Jr. developed the area in the 1920s and how the Olmsted Brothers designed Jemison Park. She was thrilled to make the connection with a previous body of work she painted in 2018 in Central Park, which was designed by the famous landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted. 

“Four years later to be here — who knew the thumbprint of Olmsted was here?” she said. “It's so exquisite how the roads in Mountain Brook follow the ridges and topography. It's so clear and beautifully laid out.” 

She said her painting inspiration comes from early 1900s Texas painter Frank Reaugh, known as the “dean of Texas artists.” She found out about him after she started painting and said he was a renowned part of the Texas art scene, creating pastels of West Texas.

“He had to adapt to being outdoors and I've had to do the same,” she said.

Past and future projects

Huddleston is a member of Preservation Dallas and a finalist for the Hunt award, and her work is on display in locations across Texas.

“I have a piece at the Four Seasons in Austin and at UT Southwestern in the Charles Simmons Cancer Center,” she said. “It’s a big deal to be in that collection and I’m really honored.”

She took part in a six-week residency at The Vermont Studio Center in fall 2019 and another residency at 100 West in Corsica, Texas. Her most recent invitation was from BRIT — Botanical Residency Institute of Texas at the Fort Worth Botanical Garden, where she painted parts of the two-acre blackland prairie behind BRIT.

She has an upcoming show at Art Space 111 Gallery in Fort Worth with three other female artists who paint natural subject matter.

Before that, Maddox is hosting a show on July 20 where her Jemison Trail paintings will be on display and available for purchase. Huddleston is gifting a portion of the proceeds from her paintings to Friends of the Trail in celebration of what they continue to do for the area.

Huddleston also takes on a lot of commission projects where she paints on client’s property. She only does about two garden design projects per year to mix things up and said she enjoys the collaboration of working with a team. 

One place she hopes to paint in the future is Percy Warner Park in Nashville. 

“I used to go there as a student and I'd love to paint a series there,” She said.  

Maddox said she’s always loved her friend’s art.

“To me, it captures the outdoors in a way that I can enjoy long-term indoors,” Maddox said. “Her art always has inspired me to find beauty in all things, which is how she lives her life.”

For more about Huddleston, visit her website at erikahuddleston.com.