On most days you'll find Obie at his easel somewhere in downtown St. Augustine, you can’t help but notice his big personality.

The road that led him here began decades ago with a Christmas gift. In high school, his grandmother handed him a set of Bob Ross oil paints. A scholarship to the Lyme Academy of Fine Arts introduced him to plein air painting. New Orleans taught him to paint on the street, and summers selling scenes on Burlington's Church Street gave him the nerve to bet everything on it.

Shortly after his twenty-first birthday he decided there was no great reward without great risk. In 1995 he landed in Ireland, where a culture that welcomed wandering artists let him paint his first canvas in Dublin's Temple Bar and trade his work for a meal, a pint, or a bed for the night. "Procrastination and lack of urgency is an artist's undoing," he wrote there, and urgency became his method: quick one-to-two-hour scenes in Montpellier, and portraits painted in the homes of Marrakesh families who came to trust him while he worked the camel treks.

Love found him on Mindoro Island in the Philippines, where he met his wife, Katherine, and in 2011 they welcomed their daughter, Oriannah. In Laos, the palette he'd held for decades grew brighter and purer. He went on to teach plein air painting in southern France and Sonoma, and saw four of his landscapes become wine labels. During the pandemic he finished his book, Obadiah Hunter Art, in time for the 90th birthday of the grandmother who started it all. Now St. Augustine is his studio. Every canvas he paints here carries the lesson of the road: it was the kindness of strangers in more than 50 countries, "people taking an interest in my art," that kept him going.

Obie has joined La Casa as part of our in-house artist series. La Casa is a space for creatives to come together, and Obie will be bringing his own creations to our walls. Obie, being an in-house artist, will allow for anyone who has a vision of town they would like to be preserved in paint to create a commission with us. Come experience St Augustine through the eyes of this tenured artist, we would love to bring his vision to life in your home!