The 76-year-old folk artist re-creates the images of her rich childhood on the canvas set up in her breakfast room, a yellow room right off the kitchen.

A bay window faces her backyard, where you see weeping willows, a red delicious apple tree and grape arbor.

Her paintings have plenty of blue skies, fields of bright flowers and children playing in the yard. "I'll be so into it, I'm reliving my childhood," says Williams, who grew up about five miles from her present home. "I don't realize it's daybreak until I look outside the window."

Williams has been drawing on her Southern past for 34 years as an artist. Her subjects are familiar to those born below the Mason-Dixon line. "I paint family reunions, college graduations and watermelon feasts," she says. Her most famous painting is "Outdoor Baptism."

"I put a lot of work into every painting. Every flower. Every field. Every leaf on the tree," she says.

Williams, who has been compared to Grandma Moses, is self-taught. She paints colorful images without shadows and faces without eyes but the illusion of them.

Williams was raised by her maternal grandmother in nearby Townsville. One of her new works is "The Blackberry Patch," a scene right out of her childhood. Her art, stories really, come from deep down inside of her. "She almost has a bucket full," she says of the African-American woman wearing a white dress and yellow straw hat, picking blackberries along a fence.

"You would pick your vegetables, gather your apples off the tree and cook all night on Saturdays," Williams says. Women would be shelling peas, frying chicken and baking cakes for the next day's big dinner. "That way, after you go to church on Sunday, you would just eat your dinner," she says. "You didn't have to rush back home. We didn't have television."

It is these familiar images that make Williams' work so endearing to her fans, who include Dr. Constance Battle, a Raleigh gynecologist.

Lonita Whitted, the owner of Artful Gallery by Artful Greetings in Durham, owns 25 original works by Williams.

"When I saw a field of flowers and two black children in her painting, it just blew me away," Whitted says.

Whitted sells a lot of Williams' work in her gallery, but she always picks what she wants first.

Valerie Whitted, Lonita Whitted's daughter and also the company's vice president of sales and marketing, says, "Williams has a great sense of color and balance. It just pops."

"Her paintings really draw people in," she says. "Everyone loves it."

Valerie Whitted was delighted when she was watching television a couple of years ago and saw something familiar in a Mazda commercial. As a car drives through a dark tunnel and winds to the left, Russell's painting, "Day Lillies" is seen. Whitted thought to herself, "That car looks like it's driving out of a Ruth Russell Williams picture." And it was.

Willie Covington, the Durham County Register of Deeds, and his wife, Sharon Taylor, own five original pieces. "I love her work," he says. "It takes me back to a period when life was complicated but simple."

He describes his paintings: girls jumping rope in the yard, another of a young girl in a field of flowers and another one of a woman sitting on a bench wearing her Sunday best. "I had two aunts that lived on farms with those old sharecropper houses," he says. Those are some of the same images he sees in Williams' paintings.

For Williams, those days were filled with the love of her family.

"They were happy days. I didn't have anything but love and that good cooking," she says. "Love in the home, the food [my grandmother] cooked. I don't ever want to forget where I come from."

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