The Mooresville native best known for painting landmarks of Lake Norman, North Carolina and other regions of the country has an 800-piece collection of regional pottery and face jugs, 500 to 600 antique tobacco cans, 275 hand-carved decoys and 40 hand-made ship models.

Stacked nearby are National Geographic magazines dating back to the 1920s and baskets of seashells gathered on annual Valentine’s Day beach trips with his wife, Vickie.

Ketchie also plays guitar in regular bluegrass pick-and-grin sessions, reads two to three books a week and plans vacation itineraries for friends and customers based on his frequent travels.

On top of that, he serves on the Friends of the Library board, as vice president of the South Iredell Chamber of Commerce’s retail and tourism committee and as a member of the Rotary Club and Exchange Club.

Somewhere in between, Ketchie finds time to capture the beauty and spirit of snow-covered farmhouses, old-fashioned country stores, flower-filled wheelbarrows, winding mountain roads and majestic coastal lighthouses.

“I named this place Landmark Galleries because I’ve always felt I’m trying to preserve our landmarks and our heritage with my work,” he says of his Main Street gallery in downtown Mooresville. “I’ve felt an obligation to paint the parts of our community that are disappearing.”

Ketchie, who earned his “Cotton” nickname for the white hair he had even as a kid, didn’t take up art seriously until he was 34. He began by drawing the family home of a friend, and when the friend’s mother had it framed, a neighbor commissioned Ketchie to sketch her house too.

Then a lady down the street loaned him her watercolors, handed him some brushes and gave him a discarded piece of art paper. Ketchie painted the old country Blackwelder’s Store at Amity Hill, and quickly found several folks offering to buy it. Pretty soon, he quit his job as a menswear buyer for Belk and became a full-time watercolor artist.

“I didn’t know that you’re supposed to paint in oils for two years before you even try watercolors,” he says. “Nobody told me that.”

Ketchie today
Now 58, Ketchie paints 25 to 30 originals a year, priced from around $350 for smaller pieces to $4,500 for large, detailed works. About 100 paintings have been released as limited-edition, signed-and-numbered prints, and of those, 30 are now sold out. Others have risen in value dramatically; “Howard’s Creek Mill,” for instance, originally sold for $50 a print and now costs $1,200.

Like other artists who’ve branched out from paintings to a wide variety of products, Ketchie has expanded his empire to include not only prints, but note cards, Christmas cards, screen savers, jigsaw puzzles, music boxes, ceramic tiles, even Adirondack chairs.

The latest addition is giclee prints, high-quality, detailed prints produced on watercolor paper.

“When you look at regular prints with a magnifying loop, you see thousands of tiny dots within the image,” he says. “But with a giclee, there are no dots. They’re printed one at a time. In the time it takes to print one giclee, a press could print more than 1,000 regular prints.”

Just as Ketchie’s products seem endless, so does his subject matter. More than 45,000 photographs sit in neatly organized stacks in his workroom, developed from trips to all but six continental-U.S. states and several Canadian provinces.

“I love traveling and taking photographs of things I’d like to paint one day,” he says. “I’d go crazy working for someone else again, being inside all day.”

No place like home
Ketchie’s favorite places to paint include Allegheny and Ashe counties in the North Carolina mountains, the Blue Ridge Parkway, the Outer Banks, coastal Maine and New England.

But he wouldn’t live anywhere but Mooresville.

“There’s nothing like North Carolina, but I especially like this area,” he says. “I’m 20 minutes from three interstate highways, so I can go anywhere in any direction. And the quality of life makes it one of the best values in the country.”

Several of Ketchie’s paintings and prints are familiar Lake Norman landmarks - the Davidson College well, Coddle Creek Church near Dale Earnhardt Inc., a red-roofed dairy barn on Cornelius Road, and three shore-line or water scenes.

In most cases, Ketchie must blend what a scene now looks like with how he’d like it to appear in a painting. For instance, he photographed a farmhouse and barn in New Hampshire in the summer, but created a winter scene.

“In real life, the house was red, the barn was brown, the truck was rusted out, the road was paved and there were a bunch of telephone poles in the area,” he says. “I made the house white, the barn red, the truck blue, added snow on the road and took out the telephone poles.”

But perhaps the biggest challenge for Ketchie is juggling his time among painting, running the business, visiting with customers, buying and selling pieces of his collection on e-Bay, traveling and staying active in the community.

“I’m looking forward to retirement,” he says in contrast to his role as the master of multi-tasking. “It won’t mean I’ll stop painting, but I won’t have to be in one place all the time. I can take two months off and travel the country, looking for more things to paint.”