Andrea Nutt

credit: Peter Frank Edwards

At 6:45 a.m. in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico, when most of the city’s residents are still tucked away in the air-conditioning, Andrea Nutt is already hard at work on a painting of Casa Blanca, the White House Museum. With her easel positioned in front of the immensity of tropical foliage that surrounds the museum — a house built on land purchased by Ponce de Léon — Nutt prepares her palette and adjusts one of several clips that keep her long mahogany hair out of her face. She prefers to paint in the early mornings, despite their oppressive mugginess. “The light is really clean, and I can give it my best of everything,” she says. “There’s no influence from the rest of the day.” The light this morning is anything but clean. In fact, a thick gray haze has settled over the city, slightly dulling its sherbet-colored building facades and muting the variegated blues of its brick-lined streets. “Still,” says Nutt cheerfully as she edges in the top of a door frame on her canvas, “there’s a lot I can do.”

Nutt, a devoted classical realist, came to Puerto Rico from Atlanta four months ago when her husband, Tony, whom she met doing Christian charity work in Nicaragua, let her pick where they would spend his first three years in the U.S. Coast Guard. After considering the Florida Keys and the Bahamas, Nutt chose Puerto Rico for its landscapes, sight unseen. Half-expecting the levels of social and economic distress she had seen while traveling in Nicaragua, Honduras, and the Dominican Republic, she was surprised by Puerto Rico’s pronounced economic stability and European flavor. “I romanticized an exotic and beautiful place,” she says, “and I was right.”

Few artists her age have acquired the accolades and patronage that allowed Nutt the flexibility for such a move. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from George Washington University at the age of nineteen, the recipient of a Presidential Art Scholarship, and at twenty-six she has already studied art full-time in Florence, Italy, and has shown work at galleries in Florence, London, Dublin, Nantucket, Atlanta, and Charleston, South Carolina. At the moment she has enough private commissions — many for religious or figurative pieces — to keep her busy for the next five years, she says.