For artist Forrest Rodts, all paths led back to the island he has been endlessly inspired by.

Despite being born in Pennsylvania, enduring a childhood spent moving around the Midwest and New England, and now residing on the North Shore, Forrest Rodts has always found a way to get back to the place he considers his hometown—Nantucket. His family roots go back generations, and today, Rodts honors that heritage by drawing on a lifetime of inspiration fostered by the island’s quiet beauty in order to create his meticulously detailed, nostalgia-tinged paintings. 

Rodts’s family goes back multiple generations on Nantucket. Growing up, Rodts and his family would pile into the car and drive from wherever they were living to spend a few weeks every summer at his grandfather’s home in Siasconset. When his grandfather passed away, the home, a one-time fishing shack that can only be occupied through part of the year, went to Rodts’s mother, and the family began spending the entire summer there. During these extended breaks Forrest took summer jobs while
otherwise enjoying the respite offered by the island.

While he was always comfortable drawing with a No. 2 pencil, he wouldn’t find the same confidence with a paintbrush until his freshman year at Hobart College. While pursuing his degree in Economics he found himself in a color composition class with a lenient professor who preferred his students to pursue a course of independent study—painting whatever suited them—while he offered gentle guidance. 

“He wasn’t too into technique. That was something you developed yourself,” Rodts recalls. “I probably could have developed faster with a technical approach but by being on my own I learned it with depth because I had to self-teach in...