Page 46 - The Hunt - Summer 2023

PETER WILLARD
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If you think there should be more to it— that fine art should be labored over— then you don’t get Peter Willard.
until 2010, when he turned 50. “I said, ‘That’s it. I’m out.’”
His wife, Sherry, now a senior director at Barclaycard in Wilmington, encouraged him to go for it. “It’s not exactly a typical retirement job,” he notes.
For a while, Willard had a studio near the Brandywine River Museum of Art, but that got wiped out in one of the creek’s periodic floods. He moved into his current space—a step-up shop with the door at the building’s corner—in 2014. He named it Trover Nine after his early internet handle. Willard was nicknamed “Trover” as a kid.
Willard’s daily grind sounds like something Jimmy Buffet might’ve dreamed up after a few
tequilas in Margaritaville. He gets to work around 9:30 or 10 a.m., painting only when the mood strikes him. And even when it does, he’ll often discard what he’s sketching or painting time and again before he finds
a keeper. “There’s something I don’t like about each painting—even the ones I keep,” he says.
Midday, Willard may take time off to play racquetball, tennis or squash. Or he may go for an afternoon ride in the countryside on his Travelo road bike for artistic inspiration. “I didn’t swim when I was a kid—now I love doing it,” he says. “They have a great outdoor pool at Hockessin Athletic Club.”
Though watercolors are his signature, Willard does create some larger impressionistic
paintings, generally in bright colors with acrylics as a base and perhaps markers worked in. After seeing a Basquiat exhibit in New York, he was inspired to adapt a red cartoon dog to his acrylics, painting the animal first and the background after. He also likes the process of sgrafitto, literally scratching the surface of a painting with a nail or other instrument for effect. “I put my stuff on Instagram,” he says.
Whatever the style or media, Willard has
a process—one that works for him. “We go to Maine, and I’ll just sit there and stare out. Or I love to go to the Barnes and sit and look at the paintings. I get lost in it. But it’s all in there,” he says, tapping his head and flashing a conspiratorial grin. TH
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44 THE HUNT MAGAZINE summer 2023