Remembering Nantucket in Art
Friday, August 31, from 6 to 8 p.m., the G.S. Hill Gallery at 40 Straight Wharf will host an opening reception for a new retrospective exhibit entitled Nantucket Past and Present. As many as 30 small paintings and a number of larger oils will be included in pairs and triptychs depicting special island locations as they are now and as they were more than 100 years ago.
Hill choses the milieu for each painting by first perusing the photographic archives of the Nantucket Historical Association. “I just love the old photographs,” he commented with a smile. Then he attempts to find the exact spot where the photographer stood when taking that photograph and sketches the scene as he sees it today. Hill confessed to letting his mind wander a bit as he sketches, imaging what it must have been like to attend that church or live on that street in centuries past. “Some things must have been really nice, but how we’d miss modern conveniences.” He does the final paintings in his island studio.
“Some locations,” says Hill, “look almost the same today as they did...Polpis, St. Mary’s, Old North Wharf...” Others, he found, while still recognizable are no longer so similar. One the photographs he chose is of Old Quidnet. “Back then there were cornfields and fishing shacks...now there’s just a walkin path and an open field.” Hill only found a very few contemporary scenes that, when he went to the location, he did not find suitable for painting.
Nantucket Past and Present will include all three lighthouses as they were in 1880, in 1960, and how they look today; most of the island’s churches; Sesachacha Pond; Codfish Park; the island wharves; Jetties Beach looking toward Town; Hulbert Avenue; and several other spot that caught his eye.
The small paintings included in the exhibit are mostly 5 x 5 and 4 x 6, painted on cedar. Hill chose wood because the extensive manner in which he prepares it to receive paint (layer upon layer of primer, sanding each before he adds the next) gives him a very smooth surface to paint upon. “I can get the fine detail” necessary in paintings that small, he explained. the larger paintings, mostly 10 x 20, are oil on canvas.
G.S. Hill has been exhibiting and selling his artwork on Nantucket for more than 27 years. His work was first shown on-island in 1977 at The Harbour Gallery on Old South Wharf. Two years later Greg and his wife Judi moved to the island to operate their own gallery in that same location.
“I went into this project looking forward to showing that Nantucket is still as beautiful today as it was a hundred years ago,” Greg explained.
In depicting Nantucket locations from the same perspective today as a century ago, Hill has succeeded in doing just that.
Nantucket Past and Present will continue at the G.S. Hill Gallery through early September.
