Valerie Eskridge is a self taught artist from Smiths Station, Alabama. She has always, like most children, expressed an interest in art early on. However, she began a passionate love for art around age 10. She used to watch the Georgia Public TV program “The Joy of Bob Ross”. Ross was a landscape painter/instructor who ignited an interest in Valerie for landscape painting. Her father, who was a carpenter by trade, built her a small art studio on the side of his shop where she would spend most of her days. Growing up in a low income household, Valerie painted on everything that she could find including scraps of wood from her father’s wood pile, even the side of her art studio wall. People began to take notice of her talents; her family and her school teachers.