Life on an island is many things, and for those who live there year-round while raising a family and making a living, restful and recuperative are probably not adjectives that adequately describe their day-to-day activities. Such is the case for artist Lizbet Carroll Fuller. Fuller who has been a creator most of her life, also fostered creativity and the arts in learning when she founded the Nantucket Lighthouse School, an independent primary school where she was the Director of Education for several years. After graduating from Wesleyan University as a double major in English and Studio Art, where she mostly focused on printmaking and drawing, Fuller found herself on Nantucket where she enrolled in a three-week painting class at Nantucket Island School of Design and Art where she embraced working with color. Pastels appealed to her due to the ease of working with them on the go as a busy twenty-something. “I like the immediacy of them, but then the fragility of them and the need to frame everything and the pieces get damaged anyway, ultimately they just weren’t working,” she explains.

“I had started a pre-school on Nantucket and I had time in the afternoons and on weekends to paint on salvaged pieces like an old wooden door I found near my parents’ house in Maine. I was just playing around, just sort of self-taught, learning as I went, figuring it all out–basic still life stuff,” she shares. She says once she was at the Lighthouse School, all of her artwork was created in the classroom in an educational student environment as she had little time for herself. 

Fuller’s stolen moments through the decades not only created an incessant passion to find the time to create, but also fed a thoughtful approach, full of imagined compositions, subtleties of light and values, all waiting to spill forth onto her canvas whenever she got the chance. “I made it a practice, like some do their yoga practice. I don’t take myself too seriously, like when I’m wondering what to paint. I think, ‘Just get painting!’” Fuller explains. 

Fuller’s style is energized with a sense of freedom as she says, “I like seeing some of the scrappiness, and the spunkiness of things. So, I don’t like to overwork my pieces.” She works often from photos she has taken around the island and sketches the composition out. “I can often tell at the beginning of the sketch if it is going to be a go or not,” she explains. “Because sometimes I think, ‘Okay, I got it.’ And it is almost like a painting without anything on it. And then I just go about figuring out the puzzle of what this is. And I love that challenge.”

Now with her family grown and more independent, she is able to devote more time to her painting. “I find myself returning a lot to places that are the old places, like downtown and the waterfront,” she shares. “And as I got more into figure painting, it was natural to go to the beach. But people now want to look fashionable and get noticed on the beach. I was imagining how people looked when I was a kid back in the 60s and 70s.” Fuller says she sourced some old photos of people along the English seaside that she could use to create compositions that had subjects in interesting outfits and communing on beach blankets while drinking tea from teacups, or as they explored the shoreline. “Again, they feel scrappy to me and I like that.” 

Lizbet Carroll Fuller’s work is found at the Artists Association of Nantucket, nantucketarts.org, and on island at Robert Foster Fine Art, robertfosterfineart.com. She can also be found on Cary Hazlegrove’s online Nantucket artist site: greyladygallery.com.