Greg Henderson’s studio has the elements of a good painting. An overgrown cactus; a crazily patterned blue, white and red linoleum floor; a three-string Japanese lute called a biwa; and often one of three sleepy, fluffy cats that take turns finding the best patch of sun to snooze in.

The sunny room, on the second floor of the artist’s clapboard house in downtown Machias, is also the repository for more than 30 years of journals kept since he was a college student in Idaho in the early 1970s and through his move to Maine in the early 1990s. From those hard-bound black books and his own vivid memories, he has culled material and spent several years, on and off, writing and painting his life story. In 2005, he took a yearlong sabbatical from his position as an associate art professor at the University of Maine at Machias.

The result is “The Illuminated Life,” encompassing 90 watercolors and seven written nonfiction stories, which recently formed the basis for a one-man show at UMM.

“When I read certain books I’ll feel like ‘I know this person. This person thinks the way I think, and has feelings like I have,'” Henderson said one afternoon. “I want my art to be like that for people. I want it to relate to their lives, but the only way I can do that is to relate my life to theirs. I hope my life matches up with theirs.”

Henderson, who has a friendly demeanor and quiet intensity about him, looked through a loose pile of his watercolors to retell one of the seven stories. He settled on “The Sheep Man.”

Early in their marriage, while he and his wife, Terry, were living in Idaho with her two children from a previous marriage, and after their son, Oliver, and daughter, Anne, were born, he took some odd jobs to supplement the family’s income. Painting didn’t exactly pay the bills. He took a job at the University of Idaho, where veterinary science researchers studied sheep.

“They were studying this thing that caused ewes to abort just before they were supposed to have the baby,” the artist recalled. “So they got them pregnant and watched them. They needed someone to come in once an hour overnight and make sure no one was having a baby. I was the night sheep man.”

In his paintings that illustrate the story, Henderson shows himself as a young, mustachioed fellow, camped out on cold February nights at the research laboratory, tending to flocks of puffy white sheep. Rows and rows of them, rendered in broad, flowing strokes of watercolor, against a bold interpretation of the Idaho night sky, all black and deep blue and purple and orange.

In one picture from “The Sheep Man,” he holds a flashlight between his teeth and helps deliver a lamb that’s coming out backward from its mother’s womb. The night sheep man was also responsible for caring for any twin lambs that sheep mothers gave birth to. The second lamb in that situation is usually rejected by the mother, so Henderson was charged with the task of finding homes for those lambs, called “bummer lambs.”

Henderson wound up with a flock of his own, and one sheep in particular became more than just livestock.

“One of these sheep befriended Oliver,” said Henderson, referring to his son, who died several years ago of complications from muscular dystrophy. “This sheep was like a dog, and he was right there with him. He’d try to play with him. This sheep was weird! We didn’t have a name for him, so we just called him Sheep.”

Sheep was both playmate and protector to Oliver. One painting shows Sheep rescuing the boy from an attack by the mean-spirited geese the family kept. The animal butts the geese into the air as they try to nip at the boy.

Another painting shows Sheep living up to his reputation of being a kind of “sheepdog.”

“I got a call from a neighbor up the hill one day,” the painter remembered. “He said, ‘Your sheep is out chasing cars.’ And sure enough, Sheep was out chasing anything that went up the road.”

In the painting Sheep is shown from above, chasing a school bus, while a group of dogs follows him.

“He was a smart sheep,” said Henderson. “And because he loved Ollie, he’d stay in the yard. We didn’t let him in the house, but he’d sleep on the porch.”

Animals figure a great deal in Henderson’s stories, as well as in his life. He and Terry have three cats, Izzy, Biff and Cyrus, and a profoundly mellow golden retriever named Cameron, who was Oliver’s service dog.

In one story, a skunk invades the Henderson homestead, and he and the kids have to finagle a way to get the wily creature out of the house. In another, he encounters a man who keeps a talking crow as a pet. In one of his most eye-catching paintings from that story, the crow perches on a young man’s arm, while in the background a man paints a picture of a nude woman with a train running by.

“But actually, that story is about racism and segregation,” Henderson explained. “It’s about a black man I knew in Idaho.”

And the skunk story isn’t about a skunk – it’s about Henderson’s family, and his love of his wife. “The Sheep Man” is about his family, too, and his son, Oliver, whose tragic death occurred while Henderson began the project. One of the first stories he wrote, about how he and Terry moved into and eventually purchased a house in Idaho, isn’t just about a house – it’s about chance meetings, and young love.

Henderson traces his choice of watercolor as a medium to the five years of his childhood spent in Japan. With a father in the U.S. Air Force, he lived in Texas, California, Illinois, Utah and various parts of Europe before settling in Idaho during his teens and 20s. Japan, however, remains a lasting creative influence.

“The neat thing about my parents is that they took us everywhere. We lived with Japanese people, not in a compound. We went to bathhouses and ate Japanese food and went to Japanese art shows,” said Henderson. “[The Japanese] paint on paper with watercolors, so I grew up thinking that most paintings were done on paper. I was drawn to watercolor more than oil, for example, because I just thought they looked more like real paintings.”

With “The Illuminated Life” finished, Henderson is looking to publish the stories and watercolors as one book. Meanwhile, he is working on other projects – a series of portraits of friends and family painted on old LP slipcases in less than an hour. He and Terry are developing a line of greeting cards featuring his paintings of wild birds, to be sold in the birding supply store Wild Birds Unlimited, which has outlets in South Portland and in Camden. He sells original paintings of Maine coastal scenes during the summer.

And there’s always the house, a large, comfortable three-story Federalist-style home, which he and Terry have lived in for eight years and continue to renovate.

He’s happy in Maine, because in some ways it’s similar to his beloved Idaho – open and mostly untamed.

“The ocean has the same feel as the desert,” he said. “When you’re looking out into it you can see forever. It’s this huge, unmeasurable thing.”

The book, both stories and paintings, is an extension of his philosophy regarding his art.

Greg Henderson can be reached at 255-1307, or by email at ghenders@maine.edu. Emily Burnham can be reached at eburnham@bangordailynews.net.