HAWI — “When you want to paint, just look outside,” Harry Wishard said, a prolific landscape artist who has created hundreds of captivating realist paintings inspired by Hawaii’s natural beauty and light. In May, he opened a new gallery in Hawi, in the former Kohala Artworks location, right down the street from the house where his grandmother was born.
“My family has been in sugar since the 1860s,” Wishard said. “Renton Road, in Ewa (Oahu) is named after them.”
The family extended to Hawaii Island, where his grandfather Leslie Wishard worked with the Union Mill Sugar Plantation, one of 14 in North Kohala between 1862 and 1975. In fact, when Ernest Hemingway visited Hawaii Island in 1941, Leslie took him bighorn sheep hunting on the slopes of Mauna Kea. This expedition is detailed in local resident Ray Pace’s book “Hemingway in Hawaii: War Would Come, Death Would Follow.”
Harry was born in Pahala in 1952, and he himself worked at summer jobs in the sugar industry, but his heart was elsewhere. He first remembers painting, and wanting to learn more about it, as a young child.
“I was about age nine,” he said. “I think it started when I got a paint-by-the-numbers set for Christmas — ‘Coral Sea Sunset.’”
He studied art in school, but for the most part taught himself to paint, working from photographs which he would then try to reproduce in exacting detail. Today, he continues to seek out new settings for his art by hiking out with a camera, or flying over by helicopter to capture a specific location.
“I try to incorporate everything I like about that scene,” he said.
As a result, his new gallery is like a room with vivid windows onto island scenics: Waimea’s rolling hills, the peace of Waipio Valley, silver streaming waterfalls that cut through green canopy, silent forest in the mist and the tumbling surf.
“I love being on the beach early in the morning,” Harry says on his website. “First light, the cool but not cold morning air, the crisp clarity of the morning sky; and the water, gin-clear, not yet rippled by mid-morning thermals. It is a refreshing, rejuvenating feeling — peaceful. So when I want to paint this feeling, I start out with a beach. Now, this beach may be in my imagination, or may really exist, but either way I’ll create a credible scene.”
“If accepted by the viewer, it gives them the sense that they are actually experiencing what they are looking at visually and emotionally. They are there. If they can really feel their feet in the water, or hear the small waves lapping at the shore, then I have done my job,” he concludes.
Visitors to Wishard Gallery also get a chance to see paintings by landscape artists Robert Weiss and Lynn Capell, who had both been part of Harry’s Waimea gallery. And, they can experience dramatic lava and landscape photography by Chris Hirata of Honokaa and the undersea imagery by Deron Verbeck of Kailua Kona.
Additionally, there’s an eclectic selection of antiques and unusual items, from Hawaiian artifacts (not for sale) to an original crank phonograph, authentic swords and knives, among others.
“I do online auctions from all over the world,” Harry said. “I got a lot from England. After Brexit, the pound is a little more affordable. We’ve got Meerschaum pipes, bronze vases from Japan and a 12th century Persian brass bowl. Anything people can’t just Google and get online is something we like to carry.”
Inspired by a lifetime on Hawaii Island, drawn to art at a very young age, Harry encourages future artists to follow their dream.
“If you want to do it, my advice is just do it,” Harry said. “You never get worse; you only get better. If that’s what your calling is, you are kind of forced to do it no matter what… But if you don’t do it, you won’t be happy.”
Wishard Gallery is located at 55-498 Hawi Road in Hawi, open 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday-Saturday, 11 a.m. to 4 pm. Sunday