Artistic duo creates unique interpretations of Smokies scenes

Charlotte Rollman swears she used to be shy.

“I did art so that people would like me,” she said, telling the story of how, as a fourth-grader, she once drew money and passed it out to her classmates, who then “really liked me.”

But when John Adkins met the woman who would later become his business partner, shyness was nowhere to be found among his first impressions. One of his earliest memories involving Rollman came after finishing a painting along Little River at Metcalf Bottoms during a Tuesday Painters outing. Both Rollman and Adkins are members of the plein air painting group, which Adkins joined following his post-retirement move to Sevierville in 2019. After laying down his brush, Adkins looked around and spotted Rollman sitting in the river, enjoying the cool water.

“I have stories about this one,” Adkins said, nodding toward Rollman from his seat in the light-filled art gallery they now share in Gatlinburg.

Perhaps the most important story began in 2022, when Rollman, now 78, first approached Adkins about opening the gallery. Adkins, at 73 a lifelong painter who spent his career as a pharmacist, had always wanted to have his work in a gallery, but his first foray hadn’t gone very well. He sold only a handful of paintings each of the three years his work was displayed at a market in Knoxville, and when Rollman made her pitch, he didn’t feel ready to try again.

“I said, ‘I’m not really sure I want to do this yet,’” Adkins said. “She said, ‘Well, I’m so-and-so age, and if I’m going to do it, I need to do it now.’ So she talked me into it.”

He’s glad she did. Adkins Rollman Gallery opened in November 2022 on Glades Road in Gatlinburg, displaying dozens of original paintings inspired by the surrounding Smoky Mountains. Adkins was “shocked,” when they sold a combined 94 paintings in their first year, averaging 100 sales annually during their first three years. Nearly all of these paintings were created outdoors—en plein air—with the artists immersed in the scene they sought to portray.

Though Rollman and Adkins often set their easels next to each other, painting the same compelling scenes, their differing techniques and artistic interpretations yield wildly divergent results.

“We can be standing next to each other and paint in totally opposite ways,” said Rollman. “He looks at things differently than me, which is nice because I’m sort of loud and in your face with color. He’s nicer, he’s sweeter, he lets you see at a distance.”

Adkins, who uses oils, starts with the darkest darks, brushing the light colors on top to create detailed, realistic works. Meanwhile, Rollman paints in acrylic, but with an impressionistic style informed by years of watercolor work. She paints color first and draws in details later.

“It’s interesting to watch her paint, because I never know what she’s doing until I see the result,” Adkins said.

“Well, it’s interesting for me to see yours,” Rollman replied. “I think that’s the ‘opposites attract.’ I knew John would be a good partner because of his love for painting, and since he’s been in this gallery, his painting has just blossomed.”

For both painters, art has been a lifelong pursuit, but the journey has led them down markedly different paths.

Adkins began studying art as a teenager but spent his career as a pharmacist. Though the Alabama native has continually sought out instructors capable of inspiring and refining his work, during his working years he could never spend as much time with his paints as he would have liked.

“Then I retired,” he said, “and now I paint some nearly every day.”

For Rollman, however, art was always part of the job description. She began her career as a drawing instructor at Ball State University in Indiana and then spent 12 years working for textile and wallpaper design companies in New York City and Chicago. During this time, she also got serious about painting, with a work-from-home position freeing up time to create paintings that she shared in shows throughout Chicago.

Eventually the company decided that she needed to start reporting to headquarters—so Rollman decided she needed to report to a different job. For three years she juggled the wallpaper design job with a part-time teaching position at Northern Illinois University. Then she earned a full-time role at NIU, where she stayed until her retirement 30 years later.

Rollman discovered plein air painting while at NIU—and so did her students, who she “made go out and paint with me.” But the bitterly cold Illinois winters curtailed the season for outdoor painting; in retirement, she decided, she needed to live somewhere she could paint year-round. After finding “heaven on Earth” in the Smokies, she moved to Wears Valley in 2016.

Meanwhile, Adkins was developing a plein air passion of his own, stemming from a 1999 workshop he attended at the Nicolai Fechin Institute in Taos, New Mexico. The experience inspired him to help found Plein Air Artists of Alabama in 2006, and he served as the organization’s president for ten years.

That term overlapped with a time of extreme and sometimes tragic change in Adkins’ life. His wife Ginger died in 2007 following a battle with cancer. He remarried in 2011, and he and his wife Laurie spent their early years of marriage caring for both their parents through the end of life. A 2019 move to the Great Smoky Mountains allowed them to start a new chapter together in a new house.

The move also allowed Adkins to reconnect with the passion he’s felt for art throughout his life. Chuckling, he recalls Laurie’s disbelief when she first saw his house in Alabama, walls covered with something like 300 paintings. She might have hoped that opening a gallery would help reduce the inventory, but such has not been the case.

“I also had guilt, because I didn’t want to leave my daughter with all my piles of paintings,” Rollman said. “But it’s made us paint more.”

For every painting hanging on the gallery’s walls, there’s at least one more back in storage—and new works created all the time.

For both artists, the Smoky Mountain landscape is a source of endless inspiration. The mountains, the seasons, the challenge of perfecting the countless shades of green and the blue-purple of distant mountains—taken together, it’s a painter’s paradise.  

When she paints, Rollman feels not just the beauty of the landscape but also the footprints of those who walked it before her.

“Sometimes when I’m in Tremont I have this sense that the Cherokee have walked this way, they looked at that tree, they saw that stream, and of course in Cades Cove you can feel it everywhere,” she said. “I don’t have people in my paintings, but I make sure there’s a path in the painting where someone could walk.”

Both artists say there’s a transcendence that occurs when they sit outdoors, rendering the view into oil or acrylic.

“A lot of times before I start to paint a painting I will pray, ‘God, guide my hand and help me know what to do,’” Adkins said. “It’s amazing to me that I can do any of this. There’s the training that I’ve done and the painting that I’ve done to get to where I am. But there’s also a part of it that is not of me. It’s in my soul.”

For Rollman, the act of painting itself holds a power she can’t explain. It’s a lifeforce on its own, sustaining and invigorating her with each brushstroke.

“I don’t know how to explain this, but when you’re out painting, and you put it all into the painting, it almost reverses time,” she said. “I won’t say that it happens every time, but there are some times in which I feel so young, painting.”

An expanded version of this story was originally published in the fall 2025 issue of Smokies Life Journal, a twice-yearly magazine that is the primary benefit of joining Smokies Life. To read more stories like this while supporting Great Smoky Mountains National Park, visit SmokiesLife.org/Membership and become a Park Keeper.