An art professor and his students travel to secluded Pritchards Island to search for inspiration at the edge of the world

By Kathy Henry Dowell

David Voros faces the ocean, his arms casually crossed, his toes covered with sand. A glorious sunset glints across his face and, for just a moment, his round eyeglasses look like gilded tangerines.

But Voros isn’t thinking about the spectacular seaside show. As he often does when he comes to USC’s Pritchards Island, he is contemplating the creative mind.

“Painting is not just an optical experience,” said the assistant professor of art, rubbing his chin as he spoke. “In a place like this, you can’t deny all the other elements. The wildness of the environment spurs creativity.”

If Voros’ theory is correct—if wildness does spur creativity—then lovely Pritchards Island is the artistic equivalent of a red-hot cattle prod.

It’s humid. It’s windy. Sand-colored snakes sidle in the forest undergrowth. Huge spiders weave webs that stretch from pine to pine. High tides cover the entire beach and lap at the edge of the woods.

In the forest, the view from a newly blazed trail is astounding: surf-pounded beach to the north, salt marsh to the west, forest to the south, nothing but roiling ocean to the east. Don’t pause too long to enjoy it, though, or tiny bugs will begin to devour the sweet back of your neck. And just try to keep them out of your freshly mixed acrylics.

It’s all part of “the whole experience,” as Voros calls it, and it allows his art students to move beyond the familiar.

“The opalescence of the seashells. The purifying effects of running water. The value of solitude to your work. The coming together of the elements. I want my students to experience all this so they can transfer it to the canvas,” Voros said.

Seeking inspiration in such an untamed Utopia is certainly not a new idea.

“It’s a nineteenth-century painter/naturalist’s approach,” Voros explained. “Famous English landscape artist J.M.W. Turner deliberately went out into storms to capture the movement of clouds.

“American Frederic Church traveled all over. I’m really inspired by his trips to Central and South America. He loaded his oils onto the back of a mule and climbed a mountain next to a volcano so that he could paint the view from there.”

Voros wants to provide his students with similar, though much less dangerous, artistic experiences. So he and a group of students make the trek to Pritchards Island each semester. Carrying a wide range of media—from watercolors to charcoal pencils, cameras and film—they drive to the Low Country, straight through Beaufort, across St. Helena and Hunting Islands, and on through the streets of private Fripp Island. When they run out of road, they park their cars, carry their gear across a floating dock, and climb aboard a small pontoon.

After a quick skip across the inlet, they dock at Pritchards Island.

Unlike many neighboring barrier islands along the southeastern coast of the United States, Pritchards Island has remained largely untouched. The island’s 1,600 acres of highly erosional land includes 2.5 miles of beachfront and

800 acres of higher ground made up of classic maritime forest habitat. Owned and operated by USC, the island is maintained as a nature preserve and is used by University researchers and classes, secondary education groups, and the general public for the purposes of research, education, and conservation. For the past 20 years, the island also has been home to USC Beaufort’s Loggerhead Sea Turtle Conservation project.

There are only three buildings on the island: the Phillip A. Rhodes Barrier Island Research Facility, a dormitory/laboratory facility named for the benefactor who donated the island to USC; a small caretaker’s cabin; and a larger cabin where Rhodes still occasionally stays.

Voros and his students are not the first artists to come here. The Arts Council of Beaufort County and the Center for Coastal Ecology at USC Beaufort sponsor an artists’ retreat on the island each April. But Voros is the first art faculty member to make Pritchards Island a regular part of his course curriculum. His students find the 19th-century approach very effective.

On the island, Painting II student Meghan Mulcahy positioned herself on a rock behind three dwarf palmettos. Her crossed legs made an impromptu easel for her large canvas.

“I used to be a marine science major,” she said quietly as she dabbed a wet brush at the canvas, “but I changed my major to art because I want to be a science illustrator. Being surrounded by nature and having the chance to paint it is an incredible learning experience for me.”

Observing her at work, Billy Maker agreed.

“I spent a semester at an art school in Italy,” said Maker, a student in Painting I. “Until then, I didn’t realize how important it is to be inspired by your environment. Here, the only restraint I have on my work is myself.”

Angela Lusk, an art education major with a studio focus in painting, had never gone on-site to paint landscapes.

“It really gives you a sense of what you are trying to capture,” said Lusk, who took Painting Coastal Landscapes during a May Session. “It’s different from painting from a photograph because you get a real sense of the elements: the air, the sun, the sand, the bugs that were biting us.”

Graduate student Michael Cassidy spent time further down the beach, fascinated by the “boneyard,” a large portion of the island’s beachfront that is covered by sun-bleached tree stumps. The eerie boneyard is created when trees from the island’s forest fall into the sea because of waves, wind, and tidal erosion.

Some five months after her trip, Kristin Harrell still thinks about it.

“Painting at Pritchards Island is very difficult because you want to paint everything that you see, and it is really hard to concentrate on just one theme,” said Harrell, a graduate student in art education. “I came away with mostly studies for finished pieces I will make, although some people did come away with finished pieces.

“The landscape is beautiful—it is nice just to experience it—but my favorite part is interacting with the other students,” she continued. “I would go out and paint something and then come back, and everyone else had gone out and painted something entirely different. We talked at length about what we had painted.”

That interaction has convinced Voros that going to Pritchards Island is not just a visual experience, but also a three-dimensional intellectual experience.

“Students can sketch the marsh, they can go into the marsh and feel the mud beneath their feet, and then they can catch clams for their dinner in the marsh. They have their meal with other students who have spent the day at various places on the island. They develop a bond with the land and with each other,” he said. “This strengthens their art and gives them a chance to talk about painting in a way that is more directly connected to them.”

But a trip to the island is just a beginning for students, Voros said.

“I tell them they don’t have to come back with a finished painting,” he said as he walked along the beach. “They can come back with several small studies, or a sketchbook full of ideas, or maybe a piece of driftwood with an interesting texture.”

With exquisite timing, Voros’ sandal hit something in the sand. He stopped and picked up a small, long-dead horseshoe crab. He studied it, running his fingers along its scalloped shell and over its stiff, grasping legs.

Inspired, he slipped the creature into his pocket.