ART LIVINGLEGACY
Jim Hutchinson, recently named to the Florida Artists Hall of Fame, with his wife, Joan. Both longtime residents of Stuart, they now reside on the Big Island
of Hawaii.
12
CATHERINE ENNS GRIGAS
Longtime Stuart resident Jim Hutchinson, known
for brilliantly colored portraits of Seminoles and
backwoods landscapes, is inducted into the
Florida Artists Hall of Fame
>>
BY CATHERINE ENNS GRIGAS
hen you look at one of Jim Hutchinson’s
paintings, you can almost hear the crackle
of dried palmetto fronds underfoot, smell
the smoke from a distant campfire and feel
the hammering sun of a summer day in the
Everglades. Hutchinson, a former Stuart resident,
is practically an artistic wizard, waving his paint brush
and transporting the viewer to another place and another
time, when Florida’s backcountry was a vast wilderness and
its shores were untouched.
If the realism of his paintings is astounding, it is because
Hutchinson, 78, has experienced the scenes he depicts. He
has led a life full of adventure, whether exploring his own
backyard or traveling the world.
Nothing has escaped his keen observation and nothing has
dimmed his pursuit of capturing it on canvas. His paintings
tell the lost stories of Florida. That is why it wasn’t much of
a surprise to anyone that the Florida Division of Cultural
Affairs honored Hutchinson in March for his lifetime of work
by inducting him into the Florida Artists Hall of Fame — except
perhaps Hutchinson himself.
“I always thought I was too old and too jaded to have
something like this affect me,” Hutchinson says, sitting at the
kitchen table of his son and daughter-in-law, Kevin and Mary
W