Auburn –

A billboard-sized area of unblemished wood needs a decoration.

So figured 21-year-old Jessi Barber of Auburn. To leave the barn doors of her childhood home unadorned would have been a crime, like entering a small child’s home and finding no paintings on the fridge.

“There was this big, empty space that just asked to be painted,” Barber said.

So, she and her boyfriend, Ryan Carle, began sketching out ideas, drawing them with pencil on the white doors.

They picked up several cans of house paint, all primary colors.

Their creation – four paintings covering two doors – have been noticed by neighbors on Hotel Road. Folks have complimented Barber’s mom, Liz Preble, in local stores.

“They’re very welcoming,” Preble said. The images make her smile whenever she pulls into her driveway.

“If I ever move, I’m taking the barn doors with me,” she said.

The paintings are a combination of styles, much like Barber, an Auburn native, and Carle, a Californian whom Barber met while the two were interning near Yosemite National Park last summer.

The right door panels are Barber’s. One is a replica of a warm canal scene by artist Max Pechstein that she saw at the Portland Museum of Art. She snapped a picture with her cell phone and used it as the basis for the work.

Above that first painting, Barber worked on a view of Portland Harbor and the city’s rooftops she glimpsed from a museum window.

The other barn door is very different.

“I take a while to sketch and plan,” Barber said. “He just goes for it.”

Carle, who once decorated his car by painting a dragon, a knight and his own footprints, created a landscape on the upper part of the door.

It started out as the White Mountains and morphed into the Sierra Nevadas. The other is a kind of Maine postcard: with Quoddy Light, seagulls, a fishing boat named the “S.S. Jessi Lyn” and in the foreground, a smiling lobster.

Standing back and looking at his door, Carle admitted to a bit of pride.

“I was amazed I painted it myself,” he said.

Preble said she wasn’t surprised.

After all, when her daughter and Carle brought up the idea, she went along with it. Other parents might have been worried.

Neither are professional artists. Carle, 22, graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz, last spring with an environmental studies degree. Barber is a junior at Ohio’s Oberlin College. She is majoring in environmental studies.

But Preble had faith.

“I know she’s quite an artist,” she said.

Barber wanted mostly to leave her mark on the home where she grew up.

For several years, she had spent little time here. Instead, she lived at school and traveled during breaks.

She wanted something back here, on the 150-year-old Brookdale Farm.

“I’m not in Auburn very often,” she said. “I wanted to leave something behind to show I was here.”