ORANGE PARK – A new Thrasher Horne Center exhibit brings the Northeast Florida outdoors to Clay County art lovers.

Jacksonville artist Kathy Stark began the project a few years ago when she travelled to the Grand Canyon. During the trip, she found herself writing down interesting things about the sites around the canyon, as well as creating little sketches and paintings of things she saw.

After returning home, this concept evolved into a gallery show that has recently come to the Thrasher Horne after its inaugural show at Jacksonville’s Museum of Science & History.

The show, called “The Wilderness of North Florida’s Parks,” is Stark’s attempt to compile information for wilderness enthusiasts living in the northern portion of the state. She visited every park or wildlife preserve, sixty in total, within an hour’s drive from downtown Jacksonville and fully immersed herself in each place.

While touring a park, Stark kept what she calls a sketchbook journal, which lists information that visitors would need to know from a layman’s perspective. She asked herself what information she would want before visiting each park, then found the answers to those questions.

These things include listings of can’t-miss sites, wildlife and other pertinent visitor information. She even partnered with the Jacksonville library to come up with a reading list for those interested in learning more about local parks. This portion of the project has been made into a book that is being sold through the gallery show.

“It includes city, state and national parks and forests, I didn’t care who owned them, I wanted to put them into a one-stop resource,” Stark said about her process for choosing what to include.

The exhibit itself features larger versions of the book pages, in addition to prints of watercolor paintings that Stark created after visiting each site. The prints are large in and of themselves, but the originals were all two by three or four by five feet. She paints these using large rolls of watercolor paper, as opposed to the books or pads that artists typically use with the medium.

“For a really large painting, a lot of times I’m only working on a small area, rolling and unrolling” Stark said. “At the end of the day I pin it to the wall and I can step back and finally see what I’ve created.”

Stark feels that the large scale of her work helps bring the viewer into the scene, which, this time, is really the goal for the project – get people into the woods.

“When we go out there a lot of times there aren’t many people, and if people don’t know about the parks they won’t continue to support and provide funding to the park system,” Stark said. “My goal is to inspire people through art to say, ‘Wow I wanna’ go out there,’ about parks they weren’t aware of before [seeing the show].”

Stark operates the Southlake Gallery in downtown Jacksonville, and has worked as an artist for as long as she can remember. After years of working to create themed environments and creating movie set pieces, she has finally landed in a place where she can create the kind of work she is passionate about.

“I love painting what I love doing,” Stark said. “Which is hiking, biking, canoeing and kayaking in our parks system. So, I’ve been painting my adventures.”

Local parks around Orange Park, Middleburg and Green Cove Springs, while not showing up in the gallery’s larger exhibit, are featured in the book, which is also on display at the Thrasher Horne.

Stark’s show will be at the Thrasher Horne through Nov. 17 during regular business hours, 10 a.m. until 3 p.m., as well as opening up an hour before shows at the center. For more information on the show, visit thcenter.org.