"I've always wanted to be an artist," said Hart, 50.However, growing up on a dairy and tobacco farm near Oxford, he said people were "expected to join FFA" or a vocational trade.

His family encouraged him, and he went to N.C. State University hoping to get into the College of Design .While he took classes in that college, he ended up with a degree in speech communication. After college, unsure of what to do next, he got a job at a picture frame store and has been in that profession since. He's currently at House of Frames on Broad Street and enjoying it.

Hart really got into art about 10 years ago after meeting his partner Jim Lux, a potter who helped inspire him. He moved from mixed media collages to more painting. The studio behind their North Durham home has eight canvasses in various stages of completion.

Three years ago Hart got even more serious about his art. He cut back to three days a week at the frame shop to see if his art could make up the income, and it has. His pieces sell for $275 to $900.

His works share similarities. Hart likes green, yellow, and red, often earthtones. Many pieces feature a landscape, and he often adds photographs he has taken, sometimes of himself. An added bonus is that he can do his own frames.

"I want to share the beautiful things and the awful things that I have seen and felt so far in my life," he said. "Finding that delicate balance of the figures, textures, imagery, colors, scratching on the canvas or whatever I happen to be touching is what is exciting."

He gets ideas from "words and phrases."

"They laugh at me at work," he said. "I think up the name of painting before I do it." Notepads in his studio list names of paintings, some related to growing up Southern Baptist.

"I recall my experiences with the church sometimes fondly, but sometimes I see now the conflicts and the contradictions I had glossed over," he said. "Reconciling a few of the conflicts and contradictions by way of my art makes me a bit happier and makes me sleep a little better at night."

Last year, Hart placed third in Durham Art Guild's Juried Art Show for his work "Happiness."

"It meant a lot to me," he said. He has appeared in the show three times.

This year's show runs through Jan. 22 at the Durham Arts Council, 120 Morris St. It's also one of the stops on this weekend's annual Durham Art Walk downtown.

This year's juror is Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, who teaches in Boston at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. More than 360 pieces were entered in the show, which is sponsored by DAG, an organization that formed in 1948 to help local artists. In addition to cash prizes for the top three artists, one artist will be rewarded with his or her own show at the guild.

Like most artists, Hart considers one of his biggest achievements his first sale. It was eight years ago to someone who was in town from Seattle. Hart was especially happy to sell it to a stranger, someone who bought it because the piece looked good.

Hart is mostly self-taught.

"I learn by mistake," he said. For example, at an early show a potential buyer asked about an object attached to the painting. Hart had to explain that he had dropped the painting, the object stuck to it, and he decided to keep it.