Alfred Birdsey, a self-taught artist, was mentored by American artists Donald Kirkpatrick and Joe Jones. Jones wintered here in the mid 1950s and was instrumental in the development of Birdsey’s loose style of painting. Birdsey and Jones spent the winter experimenting with painting styles and imagery. Out of this, and Birdsey’s interest in oriental art, came the characteristic loose brushwork watercolours for which he is best known today. Birdsey had an active art studio in Paget that his daughter Jo Birdsey Linberg, also a painter, maintains today.
