The Illustrator’s Island

Peaks Island is sanctuary for narrative art

Story By Carl Little
Photos by Claire Dibble

Brigadoon. Twice during conversation on a February morning, illustrator Scott Nash compared the residency program he and his wife, artist Nancy Gibson-Nash, set up on Peaks Island to that mythical Scottish village. True, the five or so-minute drive from the ferry terminal to the north end of the island—we took the scenic route—gives you a sense you are slipping the chains of civilization.

Yet arriving at Tolman Heights and entering the spacious new art studio there, you realize the place is very real and very welcoming. 

This summer marks six years since Nash stood before the island’s Trefethen-Evergreen Improvement Association to share some ideas he had about illustration. Reticent to blow his own horn—his illustrating bona fides are well-known—he decided to try out a few pie-in-the-sky projects. In retrospect Nash chuckles at some of his schemes, including a line of artisan word-based rugs. When he began describing a school for illustrators on Peaks, ears perked up. 

Referencing Monhegan’s famous summer art colony and such programs as the renowned Black Mountain College in North Carolina, Nash talked about bringing illustrators, narrative artists, and writers to the island, with complementary exhibitions and workshops offered to the community, which would include Portland. 

From the start the program has been invitation-only. Nash and Gibson-Nash work closely with the Illustration Institute’s advisors, many of them esteemed illustrators, who make recommendations, as do resident artists. Once the list is finalized, they put out a general inquiry to the chosen artists. 

Nash, who has been an educator for most of his professional life—he started the illustration department at the Maine College of Art and Design—is astonished by the generosity. “To have somebody like [New Yorker cartoonist] Emily Flake come here and give a three-hour workshop-talk on creating a single-panel cartoon is astonishing to me.” After that session, one of his former students said that it was one of the best experiences he had ever had, including his time at MECAD. “My nose got out of joint for a moment and then I realized, how brilliant is that,” Nash recalls. 

The artists also have given back through the work they have created while on the island. Writer and editor Martha White worked on the book On Democracy, a collection of her grandfather E. B. White’s essays that was published in 2019. Children’s book illustrator Lizzy Rockwell came up with the idea for How Do You Feel?, a picture book that introduces youngsters to a range of emotions, and made a set of sketches during her residency in 2018. After her publisher gave her the green light, she returned to Peaks in 2021 to work on the final book. She is now sharing it in schools across the country.

Nash and Gibson-Nash take pride in the Institute’s role as incubator. “A thing that didn’t exist is now out in the world,” says Nancy.

A number of residents have returned to Peaks, as island-struck as their hosts. Nash mentions the renowned Argentinian cartoonist Ricardo Liniers Siri, who goes by Liniers, who first came in 2018 and returned to vacation on Peaks in 2021. New Yorker cartoonist Flake has been back a couple of times.

“They’re starting to talk about this being a place that is friendly to artists, that this is the place to be,” Scott says. What is more, says Nancy, “The idea of being at a residency on the coast of Maine is irresistible to artists all over the world.” 

Nash and Gibson-Nash came to Maine in 2001, in essence to reconnect with their creative selves. Scott had a highly successful graphic design firm in the Boston area that had grown to three divisions with 80 employees, plus a spin-off, Big Blue Dot, where he developed designs for kids, a passion of his.

“You start building a company and then you realize as an artist that you’re doing more managing than creating,” he says. 

The couple had friends in Portland and on visits they looked around at houses. One day, Nancy’s friend Marianne Lloyd, who had worked at Big Blue Dot, took her on a bike ride around Peaks Island. Halfway around she was wondering to herself, “What is this place?” She and Scott had grown up on Cape Cod and missed being near the water. 

“I came home and told Scott, ‘We need to move to an island,’” a proposal he greeted with some reluctance. “If we’re going to move to a new place, I want to be in Portland,” he said, but his spouse “cast a spell” on him and when he recovered, they were at a closing on a Peaks Island home. “Honestly, Nancy was right,” Scott says: “I’ve never felt more connected to the community, the community here and in Portland.”

Part of the attraction of Peaks and Portland was the creative community they represented and how welcoming everyone was. And then there was the amazing line-up of illustrators on the island, among them, Doug Smith, Cynthia Jabar, Jamie Hogan, Marty Braun, Kevin Hawkes, and the late Tim Nihoff, all acclaimed for their children’s books and other narrative art.

“It certainly made me feel like I was at home,” says Scott, and he and Nancy soon got to thinking, “Well, this is an illustrator’s island.” 

And it’s an illustrator’s state: The Institute has welcomed a host of well-known Maine-based picture book artists to the island, including Chris Van Dusen, Ashley Bryan, Kevin Hawkes, and Melissa Sweet. Crime novelist Brenda Buchanan and playwright Elizabeth Peavey have also found a writing refuge on Peaks. 

And what of their own creative endeavors? With two assistants and an engaged board, the couple have been responsible for the program from the start. Somehow, they have managed to maintain their personal artist practices while managing the institute. 

“To be honest,” says Nancy, “while the nonprofit is a full-time labor of love, it also constantly ‘fills the well’ for me personally.” To have the chance to be exposed to artists they admire and learn about their artistic process “has been nothing short of amazing and spurs the imagination in profound ways.” 

The Institute’s exhibitions have also proved inspiring. She has had work in several of them, including a devilish-looking typewriter in “Illustrated Monsters by Monster Illustrators” and a “crazy couch” in “The Art of Mending.” The latter, a collaboration with illustrator Kate Gardiner, took her passion for found objects to a larger scale “and practical purpose”: The couch now resides in the library at Mechanics Hall in Portland. 

Scott, too, draws on the energy of the resident artists. One of the side benefits of interacting with them is “gaining their insights and learning that many of us lead crazy, multi-gigged lives.”

He is currently writing two illustrated novels for kids and illustrating another, Bunny and Clyde, written by Megan McDonald. He continues to do graphic design through the NASHBOX studio in Portland and has returned to directing video production and animation through the Institute’s Drawing Is Thinking and Art & Story series.