VALDOSTA — A brochure suggests that artist Jim Touchton paints the whirlwind. The remark headlines an interview accompanied by prints of Touchton’s swirling, color-explosive paintings of flowers, gardens, skylines, parrots, in a brochure by New York’s prestigious Fischbach Gallery, which has displayed the artist’s canvases for several years. Yet, one thing becomes apparent upon meeting the artist and spending a frenetic hour with him.

Jim Touchton is the whirlwind.

A few hours before his arrival at the Annette Howell Turner Center for the Arts, where an exhibit of his paintings opens today, Center Director Paula Brown received a dispatch on United Nations letterhead from Ada Samuelsson, a Swedish diplomat who has been a friend of Touchton’s for a few years. “I could stand in front of Jim’s painting for hours and be mesmerized by the variety and range of emotions it brings to me,” Samuelsson writes, “everything from Peace, Tranquility, Retrospection, Hope to Happiness, Joy and Pure Visual Feast is found in each stroke of his brush.”

A few hours later, with the center still abuzz with excitement from the letter, Jim Touchton arrives on the heels of Tropical Storm Bonnie and a day ahead of Hurricane Charley. His arrival is marked by a rain of words and a free-wheeling spirit.

In conversation, Touchton’s eyebrows rise. His eyes flash wide then thin to slits. His arms and hands often sweep outward before growing calm. He pounces like a big cat through the arts center’s Boyette Gallery, where he’s hanging his show; he circles several canvases on the floor then leaps to another painting across the room.

He is dynamic, in constant motion. Even when he is momentarily still, he bristles, flexes and coils as if ready to strike out on some new idea. He supplies stories from his life and thoughts on art in a machine-gun staccato of words.

Names of artists, artists he’s known as mentors and friends, pour from his lips. Irene Dodd, one of South Georgia’s great artists and a former Valdosta State art professor, whom Touchton has known since his youth and he says inspired him to become a painter when he once housesat for the Dodd family and found the smell of paints on canvas intoxicating, whom Touchton approached in his 20s, having never had an art class, saying he wanted to become an artist and Irene Dodd accepted him into art studies at Valdosta State. Lamar Dodd, the late masterful painter and Irene’s father, who was one of the primary forces behind Georgia’s connection with the arts during the last half of the last century, who served as Touchton’s instructor at the University of Georgia. Elaine and William De Kooning, yes, those De Koonings, the famed artist couple, with William towering as a giant of 20th century art, with whom Jim Touchton maintained a friendship for many years, with Elaine De Kooning taking the youthful Touchton under her wing, whom often referred to herself as “mother” when writing him, the De Koonings with whom Touchton lived and traveled on numerous occasions.

They are only a few of the artists who reflect Touchton’s meteoric rise from Lowndes County to the galleries of New York. Touchton speaks of his boyhood, growing up in Hahira, as the only child of the late Jerry and Ruby Touchton, then after the death of his mother, step-mother Joyce, with oil-painted portraits of young Jim, the sole heir, hanging on the walls, of parental plans for young Jim to become a doctor, a lawyer, a professional, though when he became an artist and an artist of some renown, Jerry Touchton spoke of his son’s chosen career, talents, and accomplishments with beaming pride. Jim Touchton recalls taking childhood trips to visit family, such as Aunt and Uncle Myrtle and Roy Dasher in Puerto Rico, and Aunt Irma Simmons in Miami, aunts who are like surrogate mothers to Touchton, with both aunts expected to attend tonight’s Valdosta opening, aunts who lived in exotic climes filled with colors as bright as Touchton’s native South Georgia, colors and experiences that painted his childhood and have lingered within him throughout his 52 years to find their way into the vivid hues of his paintings. Three decades later, Touchton still seems incredulous, recounting a trip to Europe as a young man in the company of great and famous artists who would point at segments of a Monet painting and make comparisons to Touchton’s work. His conversation swirls with locales that are mirrored in the paint and canvas surrounding him. Painting flowers he grew while living for nearly 20 years in Manhattan, of painting the sea and monolithic architecture he finds near his home in the Hamptons (yes, those Hamptons, which have been a favorite New York State hang-out for artists, such as Jackson Pollock, the rich, the famous, for years). Early abstract works — which may or may not be included in the Valdosta show, Touchton remained uncertain last week — inspired by the roadside fatalities of armadillos he’d see driving back and forth between New York and his native Georgia.

And he often returns to the subject of Georgia, South Georgia, Lowndes County, Valdosta, Hahira, his native home, where he graduated from Lowndes High School, where fell in love with the colors of the South, where he has so often returned through the years to find inspiration and visit family and friends, such as Lena Bosch, who greeted him at the arts center last week. Where he has often returned to show his work and support the local arts.

His words, his conversational style, at least speaking to a reporter on a rainy afternoon while taking a break from hanging a show, flow from the literal to the figurative. He mentions a quote from another artist: “If a painting is the first thing you think about when you wake up in the morning, then you’re a painter.” But Touchton continues that he dreams of painting in his sleep, “so I don’t need to think about it first thing in the morning. I’ve already been dreaming of painting all night, whatever that means.” He free-forms from expansive expressions to detailed subtleties, how painting parrots with their colorful feathers and plumage is similar to painting the wind-rippled petals of flowers; how he might incorporate photo references, scenes in front of him as well as his imagination into composing a painting; how he covers all of the canvas at once, ever moving, ever pushing the paint, his face inches from a subject while transcribing what his eyes see to the brush in his fingers and then onto canvas; of how he will stand, kneel, crouch, bend, rise, and then demonstrates these moves by a finished painting in the Boyette Gallery, looking like a surfer dude in the white T-shirt and shorts he’s worn to hang the show.

When he paints, Touchton says, he does not think; he may plan prior to placing paint to canvas, but painting, for him, is action, not thinking. Painting is response and reflex. Painting is a verb, not a noun. He may have a plan when he starts, but he’s more anxious to discover what the paints might unfold. Happy accidents. Painting is the act of starting, he says. He admits, however, that he doesn’t even need paints, or brushes to paint; his eyes and mind are always painting, visualizing the things he sees in his everyday life in terms of how they would be painted.

And this is the paradox of the man. He is generous in conversation, possibly open to a fault, willing to answer any question, but he remains an artist, an observer, slightly removed from the situation while simultaneously engaged in what is happening then influencing what happens next.

His conversational style sparkles with life, verve and color. Jim Touchton has a sense of fun in everything he discusses. Given his energy, one could imagine that he’s as excited about this conversation as he’s been with any conversation in his life. He seems as engaged about a conversation with a reporter from his hometown newspaper as he has likely been when he met people such as Dustin Hoffman whom he encountered upon returning to the De Koonings’ home one afternoon several years ago when the actor served as the narrator for a documentary on the famous couple’s lives, or Susan Sontag who attended a party given in Elaine De Kooning’s honor at Touchton’s Manhattan home, and the names go on and on.

Descriptions of Touchton’s conversational style could easily fit his paintings. Both are bold, colorful, lyrical whether expressed in words or brushstrokes. Both are expressionistic. Both have the impact of spontaneous immediacy, weaving the abstract into the illustrative. As Touchton has done in conversation, his exhibit is retrospective, telling the story of his artistic life of the past 30 years. He can look at one canvas of flowers with skyline bristling in the background and know that he painted it nearly a quarter of a century ago while living in his Manhattan apartment. Small paintings gathered on the floor are works he completed a few days earlier with something called Egyptian ink and a piece of bamboo that he found while shopping at a TJ Maxx. And the abstract armadillos from his school days are in storage nearby; he can physically gather them for the show as easily as he can recall the stories of painting them.

All of which leads one to realize the Fischbach Gallery was right. Jim Touchton does paint the whirlwind, but his exhibit represents the whirlwind of his life, with the ability to connect to those dreamy moments people encounter in the whirlwinds and whirlpools and shining wisps of their own lives.