Jill Hoy is forever chasing the light and color in her vibrant-hued skirts around Stonington and Deer Isle.

The plein-air painter has been spending summers in Maine since the mid-1960s when her father bought a sea captain’s home on the King Row in Deer Isle.

She studied at the New York Academy of Art and has a fine art degree from the University of California at Santa Cruz.

“It was going back and forth from the East to the West Coast that I began to really see how different the qualities of light were from place to place,” she said.

“Queen Anne’s Lace Above Harbor,” oil, Jill Hoy

Hoy has exhibited in galleries from Los Angeles to Boston, Key West to London and throughout Maine.

Her paintings are in the Portland Museum of Art, Harvard Business School, Boston Public Library, Wellington Management, Fidelity Investments, Art in the Embassies, Blue Cross Blue Shield, as well as in more than 700 private collections.

She captures what she sees in the moment because it may not be there the following week. Houses, unfortunately, come and go. Landscapes change.

“It was here that I became a painter with an appreciation of Maine land and seascapes, work ethic, architecture and gardens, as well as light, energy, pattern, flow and the documentation of place,” she says.