WENDELL - At the end of Pleasants Road is a bright yellow farm house with purple and pink Queen Anne bric-a-brac, six dogs, five cats, two horses and a room full of charming finds scouted from antique stores, flea markets or family closets.

This is the world of Susan Brabeau. Turn the clock back a century, throw in a few of Brabeau's friends in gently humorous scenes with all those "things" and you've got a Norman Rockwell of Wendell in the works.

Brabeau is a painter, a period painter. Her painting of a 19th century "English Farm Market" won first place in the professional division at the N.C. State fair.

N.C. Agriculture Commissioner Steve Troxler thought so much of it, he got the fair to call her up last week and offered to buy it for $500 to rotate it in state government buildings. Nice exposure, Brabeau admits, but she's used to selling her paintings between $3,000 and $6,000 each. She hated to say no, she said, but with one painting taking a month to six weeks working night and day, she had to pass.

Brabeau does what Rockwell did to New England with Wendell people and places, minus a century or two. She uses faces of friends from her church, life in Wendell or far-flung cast of friends and dresses them in period costume and places them in her paintings.

And there is always all that dizzying action. Like Brabeau's house, her paintings tell a story. There's the bemused expression of the woman who has apples taken from her basket by the neighbor boy. The side show woman in all her gaudy charm in Beside the Side Show, which won best of show at the fair several years ago.

Sitting in Brabeau's house is like sitting in one of her paintings. There is the stained glass that came from the wife of the president of the MGM, a surrogate mother during her actress days. The ceiling in the dining room is painted in geometric designs created by Brabeau. Rugs are on every floor, the rustic cupboard she scooped up from a Selma antique shop for $200 without cabinets is stuffed with colorful quilts and the shelves are lined with a mish-mash of old china she got at the place.

Her quilts made their way into one of her paintings - the one Troxler wanted to buy. In that painting, also on display at the fair, the quilts were hanging from the line in the side yard of her house. And her bedroom with the crocheted piece draping the canopy bed in elegant whimsy makes it into another painting. She paints in her dining room once she's drawn the paintings and planned them in her studio, a sharecropper's house she had moved to the property.

Many of her paintings turn up as puzzles. You can find the puzzles at Wal-Mart, K-Mart, and even the museum shop at the N.C. Museum of History. She painted a piece of the drug store at the history museum, with all the fixtures and life from a drug store that actually was located in downtown Raleigh. That painting was turned into a puzzle.

Her paintings have ended up as puzzles ever since she was in a Beverly Hills art show years ago and an agent from Applejack Art Partners approached her about representing her for just that market.

Brabeau hasn't always been an artist. She started her professional career as an actress. And it was while she was an understudy on Broadway, getting bored, that she tried her hand at painting. She drew and painted backstage and got an immediate offer to buy her work.

"I thought, 'This is cool,''' she said. "It was just a more comfortable life. I didn't have to get dressed up, memorize scripts or go on an audition. I decided to be in control of my life at my own pace."

Brabeau has won another recent award for her work - a Jerry Miller award given at in August at Lazy Days in Cary.

She keeps her paintings affordable for Wendell friends and neighbors by offering giclees of her work. Giclees are made with computer technology to create a digitized equivalent of a limited edition print. Her canvas giclees sell for $200 to $800.

She recently tried out a feature that proved to be popular at a booth she operated at the Wendell United Methodist Church festival. She takes a giclee and paints a person or two in the painting. She's coupled grandmothers who died before their grandchildren were born with their grandchildren as well as the living. Each addition -- person or animal -- is $100.

Brabeau's always had a penchant for the old.

She was raised by her grandmother, and was surrounded by her great-grandmother's things, she said.

"I've always loved old things," she said.

Sometimes that strikes a chord with viewers. Brabeau said a woman who had seen her paintings at the fair e-mailed her.

"She said she just stood there and cried -- it reminded her of her grandmother,'' she said.

Brabeau said there are times she looks at a blank canvass and thinks she ought to paint other subjects.

"It's comments like those that make it all worth it," she said.