A work of art

Andrew Kusmin started painting as a hobby to keep his sanity. Art now takes him to mind-boggling heights.

A Plymouth native, Kusmin recently won awards for his watercolor paintings in prestigious national and regional competitions. But it is his work on the local art scene that drives the former dentist.

The incoming president of the Plymouth Guild for the Arts, Kusmin recently completed a series of paintings of local landmarks to grace the dining room of a local restaurant.

His work will also be on display at a soon-to-open art gallery on the town's training green. Kusminarts opens later this month on an appointment basis.

"A lot of things are falling into place right now, things that I've worked a long time for," Kusmin said.

It may be something of an understatement, especially for a guy who spent nearly three decades working on people's teeth.

In recent months, Kusmin has won the National Watercolor Society's Watercolor West Award for his depiction of a local fishing boat that sank in frozen Plymouth Harbor last winter.

The society selected the painting, "Nicole II," from a field of 3,000 for one of the 21 coveted slots in its annual watercolor show in Los Angeles. The society has since recognized Kusmin as one of a dozen artists invited to become signature members of the society.

And if that's not enough, Kusmin will receive the gold medal tomorrow night for another of his watercolors in a show sponsored by the New England Watercolor Society at the Guild of Boston Artists.

The painting, Door to Door, depicts a view through the old porch door of a classic, shingled New England farmhouse. The view extends into the porch and deck beyond, through a fence and yard into woods.

The judges praised the painting for its incredible depth.

"You can really move from one door to the next right through the painting," one judge said.

The painting will be on exhibit with many of Kusmin's watercolors when his gallery opens on the corner of North Green and Sandwich streets in coming weeks. A dispute over parking spaces has limited the opening to just two rooms to start. Kusmin will also initially be open by appointment only, until the parking situation is resolved.

Watercolors of notable local landmarks - like Forefathers Monument, Bug Light and the Pilgrim Maiden - line the walls. Some are prints but most are originals. More than two dozen of the landmark watercolors - some originals, some prints - decorate the walls of the newly redesigned restaurant in the Radisson Plymouth.

Visiting the landmarks and coordinating the gallery opening with town officials over the last year has been an unexpectedly sweet homecoming for Kusmin, who grew up on Brewster Street in the 1950s. Longtime residents will remember him as the son Bernard Kusmin, a town meeting representative and civic leader who owned a women's retail clothing store on Shirley Square.

Andrew Kusmin graduated from Thayer Academy and followed his friend, Peter Gomes, to Bates College. After a two-year stint in the U.S. Navy, he set up practice as a dentist and started a family with his wife, Judy, in Westford.

Kusmin discovered his artistic talents almost by accident when he was 37. He enrolled in an adult education art course to escape the pressures of his dental practice and found his calling.

"At the time I was making that decision partially to save my sanity, from the stress of work," Kusmin said. "I went to the adult ed course literally as an escape and fell in love with it right away. I chose that course because it was there and it took me over completely."

Kusmin stuck with watercolor over other art mediums because it allowed him to take the work with him anywhere he went - from home to work to the beach. He also loved the effect.

"It's a medium that's very translucent," he said. "You can treat light beautifully with it. It's softer, but with the way I paint, sometimes with up to 20 layers, I can push and pull the images through the glaze so the color is more exciting. You see through one color to another so the light is passing through layers of paints, not just one mixed layer. It's much richer."

He spent the next 13 years fixing teeth by day and refining his brush strokes by night. When he turned 50 and made his last college tuition payment for his children, Ethan and Jessica, Kusmin made his break from dentistry and decided to devote himself to art.

He took advanced watercolor classes at an art center in Lexington and had such a feel for the medium he eventually started teaching as well. He opened a studio in Manomet after moving into a summer home near the beach four years ago. He still teaches once a week in Lexington.

Kusmin has won more than 80 local and national awards for his work and is exhibited nationwide and published broadly, but his focus remains local.

The homecoming has offered an opportunity to help unite local artists.

Though a past president of the New England Watercolor Association, the oldest watercolor society in the country, for four yeas, he looks forward to a more relaxed and community-based approach to advancing the arts.

Later this month he will succeed Brenda Cobb as president of the Plymouth Guild for the Arts. He plans to continue work already begun on combining the group's forces with the artists of the Plymouth Community Art Center.

"It sounds so trite, but what I like is thinking of Plymouth in its own right as a mini-successful art society that mirrors these bigger groups but is more intimate and community-oriented," he said. "We're not trying to become a national anything. We're trying to grow in the community. I feel like it's a very comfortable place to be in this town, more directly in touch with the community rather than knowing your painting is out there and wondering who is seeing it."

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