At the gate of Mary Ann Judd Johnson's home in American Fork is an enormous steel sculpture of an eagle in full flight.

Tucked at the terminus of a dead-end road, a few gazing balls, some purple profusions of Dame's Rocket flowers and an enormous natural sandstone sculpture line the road's edge. The front garden is so thick that it obscures the three-story house, leaving just a cupola and the tin roof visible. Filled with garden rooms, vine-covered arches and thickets of flowers, the gardens are specifically modeled after Monet's in Giverny, near Paris.

It takes a little work to find the front door at the end of a corridor. Inside, the house is stuffed with art -- 450 of Johnson's own paintings, sculptures and stained glass panels, many other paintings that are the gifts of students and friends, collections of dolls and animal figurines, African art and houseplants in many corners. At some points it is hard to tell whether you are indoors or outdoors.

Johnson is an artist whose time has come, but despite accolades and financial success, she will not be pinned down to a single style.

In May, American Fork agreed to purchase 37 of Johnson's paintings for $43,000. And Lehi is making the final installments on a $150,000 purchase of 230 of Johnson's works, which depict in classic detail the historic homes and buildings of those two cities.

The purchases are not commissions and came about almost by accident.

Years ago Johnson had a student who wanted to paint houses. The student never finished a painting, but Johnson found herself drawn to the subject.

"I would stop on the way home [from teaching school] and draw on a piece of paper on the back trunk and go home and paint it," she said. "I'd imagine my life in the houses, whether I'd be rich or poor, happy or sad."

Johnson painted the homes and buildings she remembered from her childhood in the American Fork and Lehi area, eventually beginning to show her work after her husband talked her into taking out a $1,500 loan to frame some. At first glance the buildings in the paintings may seem ordinary, but Lehi officials began to recognize that Johnson's work, completed over decades, was in some cases the only documentation of parts of the city that no longer exist.

In American Fork, Johnson was inspired by the city's $1.7 million renovation of its historic City Hall, completed in 2006.

"I walked in the building and my mind flooded with pictures that should be there," she said.

She began painting more historic buildings and spent $6,000 to have dozens of them framed, without telling anyone what she was doing. Later, when the city called to ask if she could mount a show for the building, Johnson was ready. It was these paintings the city has now purchased.

For some artists, this might be the end of the story. Johnson has sold more than 100 paintings of the Lehi Roller Mills alone and is known for her paintings of LDS temples, and could easily have become established as a painter of historic buildings. But Johnson is not so easy to pin down.

In the nooks and crannies of her labyrinthine home are at least dozens of paintings, in both the primitive and folk style, filled with wild colors and Alice-in-Wonderland patterns -- sandstone arches, rabbits, pigs, parrots, dragons, Albert Einstein, Peruvian-inspired images of hummingbirds in the night sky and myriad other images. And they are all done to be viewed in three dimensions.

Each of the works stands alone. Viewed normally, Albert Einstein -- and she has done many of him alone -- seems to be a stylized portrait in wild and whimsical colors. But viewed through a broken pair of paper 3-D glasses at her kitchen table -- where she prefers to paint, eschewing her studio --¬ Einstein becomes startlingly present. The texture of his skin, the angle of his face, the look in his eyes -- he seems to be standing in front of the viewer. In the background, the cosmos swirls as if by magic.

In other portraits, Johnson has invented a technique that appears simply to be dots of swirled green paint topped with a pinpoint of orange, but viewed in 3-D, these suddenly look for all the world to be actual emeralds with moving light shooting from them as they float in the air.

Johnson said she has been making 3-D images for more than a decade and very few have been seen by anyone. She says she is shy about her work and refuses to "pat people on the back" in order to be shown in galleries. Pressed, she admits she would like one day to show them, perhaps in the Springville Museum of Art, but has never approached anyone.

Johnson said she has never seen the world like other people. As a young student, one teacher looked at her work and exclaimed that he had thought she was dumb, but seeing her work, wondered if she was a genius. Another teacher confronted Johnson for never completing her assignments right.

"I can't do it the way you want it done," Johnson said back. "I can only do it the way it comes out in my brain."

"I had never thought of it like that," the teacher said.

Nothing Johnson paints or sculpts is derivative. She is equally inspired by traveling the world or walking her hometown, and paints both. She says she has been called stubborn and infamous and has been accused of taking drugs and being antisocial. She calls herself a peasant artist, someone with no pedigree who has educated herself through hard work and discipline.

"I don't want to compete," she said. "I just want to do what I want to do, and I don't care if people buy my work or not."

To see Mary Ann Judd Johnson's paintings of local historic buildings, visit American Fork Historic City Hall at 31 N. Church St. (50 East), American Fork, or the Hutchings Museum, 55 N. Center St. in Lehi.