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BRUSH WITH GREATNESS
Why Meghan weeks might be the next big name coming out of Nantucket’s art scene.
Art investors are always looking for that undiscovered talent who is poised to become the next hot artist to collect. The case could be made that that moment is about to happen for island painter Meghan Weeks. Although she’s been part of the Artists Association for twenty years—since the ripe age of fourteen—Meghan just started painting professionally full time this fall, thus turning her lifelong side hustle into an around-the-clock career. When considering what this thirty-six-year-old painter has already achieved with one arm tied behind her back—racking up a number of awards while painting only 20 percent of her time—one can just imagine the breadth and depth of artwork that she’s about to unleash.
Meghan’s journey toward this full-time pursuit began many years ago on Nantucket. “Growing up surrounded by a community where art is touchable and accessible was such a huge point in my own growth as an artist, realizing that this was something that people actively participate in and do,” says Meghan, whose family goes back generations on Nantucket. “I remember hopping out of the pharmacy with my ice-cream cone as a kid and seeing someone painting on Main Street. It didn’t seem like too much of a leap to get from what I was doing in my sketchbooks to making something that would hopefully bring joy to other people.”
Indeed, at the age of ten, Meghan strutted into Kathleen Knight’s gallery on India Street, where she often loitered to gawk at the artwork, and pitched the owner on her pieces. “I’m painting these shells with acrylics,” she said to Knight. “Would you ever be interested in selling them?” Perhaps appreciating the girl’s gumption, Knight agreed to offer them for $10 a piece, giving Meghan 50 percent of the earnings. “So I got over the fear of putting my nose out there and trying to show my work early on.”
Though she can technically trace her start as a professional artist back to Knight, Meghan was reluctant to pursue painting full time. While an undergrad at Yale, she first planned to double major in art and physics. “Yale’s studio program didn’t have a lot of space for representational art at the time,” she said. “So I ran away from it for a bit and jumped into architecture.” After Yale, she pivoted once again by pursuing a master’s degree in curating at The Courtauld Institute of Art in London. She then spent a year as an artist-in-residence in Scotland, an experience that led to meeting her husband, before putting her master’s degree to work at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. For the past ten-plus years, she has worked as a curator at the Boston Public Library’s historic McKim Building. “I’ve always been steering in another lane close to art, dipping back and forth into it,” she reflected. “A lot of my craft comes through osmosis, being around wonderful paintings and drawings and having a really keen interest in how the thing was made.”
Meghan’s landscape and architectural paintings evoke a distinct time, place and atmosphere. There’s an organic quality to her brush strokes that render familiar locations such as Brant Point, the Oldest House and Madaket Bridge with both nostalgia as well as a fresh reinterpretation, as if one is seeing the place for the very first time. “We have a number of outdoor painters on Nantucket, but Meg truly specializes in en plein air painting a la Monet,” said Robert Frazier, the artistic director of the Artists Association of Nantucket. “Meg paints the Nantucket of today. The real places in fully faithful detail. Considering how fast things change here, the island we take for granted now will become the how-it-used-to-be we’ll likely miss in fifteen or twenty years. That will be recorded on her canvases. As with earlier Nantucket artists like Anne Ramsdell Congdon or Bob Perrin, those enduring images should have lasting value unaffected by trends in the art scene.”
“As an artist, it’s important to be sight specific,” Meghan explained. “I don’t take any liberties. I try to capture exactly what’s there at that moment in time, with all its grimy glory.” Meghan’s use of color captures light in a way that engages all the senses. One can smell the briny air of the Madaket morning, can feel the humidity in town at the height of summer, or hear the water lapping under the hulls of the boats in the harbor. “I think a lot of the subjects I work on, particularly with architecture, I’m coming to with an appreciation for the story of the place or the building,” she said. “I’m not looking at the subjects as shapes and colors; I’m looking at them as places that have meaning, a history and a story.”
Perhaps above all emotions, Meghan hopes her pieces convey a sense of gratitude. She counts herself extremely fortunate to be part of this community of artists on Nantucket, which has fostered her innate talents since she stumbled out of the pharmacy as a kid and encountered her first plein air painter. In addition to the decades of support she received from the Artists Association of Nantucket, for which she now serves on the board, Meghan has also trained under such island masters as Thomas R. Dunlay. She currently shows at Robert Foster Fine Art as well as at the Artists Association. “There is a community of artists on Nantucket that is professional and active and engaging the island in an intimate way,” she said. “If anything, I want to be part of that conversation and bring more attention to Nantucket art.”
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