Philip Gentry

Philip Gentry spent years as a hospital radiology technician, trained at Northwestern Michigan College, where the work was all about patience, steady hands, and learning to read what light reveals and what it hides. His painting life began almost by accident: during a rain-soaked August week in a rented cottage on the Leelanau Peninsula, he found a forgotten tin of watercolors in a kitchen drawer and painted the dunes from the window eleven times. He judged every one of them bad, but he kept going. A year later he and his family sold their house downstate and settled in Traverse City, Michigan, where the dunes remain his favorite subject and his most honest critic.

Philip works in watercolor on rough cotton paper, letting pigment pool and settle into the texture so that sand, water, and northern Michigan sky take on a soft, painterly looseness. His scenes favor open shorelines, shifting weather, and the quiet gray-blue light of the Great Lakes, translated onto canvas with the grain and bloom of the original paper intact. These pieces bring a calm, airy feel to living rooms, bedrooms, and reading nooks, and they are right at home in lake cottages, sunrooms, and any space that could use a window toward the water. Below are Gentry’s canvases in our shop, ready to hang.