The unexpected play of light, color and design are recurring themes throughout Alastair’s work. Look closely at any of his paintings and you will see sensitive handling of draughtsmanship and gesture, a lively search for color and edges and resonant effects of light and shadow. Alastair’s atelier training in nineteenth-century methods clearly informs his work and plays off his love of Impressionism and twentieth-century schools of abstract painting.

Trained at the Rhode Island School of Design, Ingbretson Studios and Cecil Studios in Florence, Italy, Alastair now lives and works in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. His work explores a wide range of subjects and includes landscape, maritime, still life, portraiture and figurative painting.

Alastair co-curated the 2016 exhibition “Illuminating Tarbell, Legacy in Action” in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. He is an active painting instructor. His work is in noteworthy collections including the St. Botolph Club in Boston and the New Hampshire State House.

After leaving NYC in 1990, Dustan Knight moved back to her hometown, a little island off the coast of Portsmouth, NH, where she commuted to Boston to complete a Masters in Art History, began a successful teaching career, and started a family. Her current artwork usually begins with a personal real-life experience in a familiar landscape — the rough granite Seacoast. She often creates multimedia artworks on paper on location, which are then torn apart and reassembled into sketches that are so loose and evocative that they open up the possibilities of larger, more complicated work. Recently, her collages have become three-dimensional and she uses scrap wood pieces to break the “empirical rectangle” of the canvas.

Tom Hughes was born in Massachusetts in 1965. He was a staff artist at the Christian Science Monitor newspaper in Boston in the 1980s, finally leaving to practice fine art, at which he’s been occupied for more than 30 years.

Hughes has had solo exhibitions in galleries in the New England States, North Carolina, Lake Tahoe, San Francisco, and France. He is proficient in several painting media including oil, acrylic, and watercolor, with subject matter comprised of figure painting, portrait, landscape, and the odd still life or genre picture. Hughes’s work has been featured in American Artist Watercolor magazine, Fine Art Connoisseur, for which he painted the magazine’s publisher B. Eric Rhoads’s portrait and Southwest Art magazine. An example of Hughes’ watercolor painting is featured in Watercolor Painting by Tom Hoffmann (Watson Guptill, 2012). In 2019, Tom Hughes won the $15,000 Grand Prize for painting at the Plein Air Convention and Expo, held in San Francisco.

In 2018, Tom Hughes was made a signature member of the Plein Air Painters of America. After 21 years in California, Hughes has moved back to his native New England.