Edward W. (Ted) Hewett is back painting wood chests. The 81-year-old Vineyard Haven artist, who has done all kinds of paintings from portraits to abstract, is revisiting an art form.

“Friends ask me, ‘So when are you going to do another wood chest?’” Mr. Hewett said.

The answer is now.

Mr. Hewett used to paint a lot of wood chests: functional art that is a mix between something useful in the house and a one-of-a-kind piece of art work.

A woodworker assembles the box. Mr. Hewett, in consultation with his customer, takes the seed of an idea and expands on it. Each side of the box is a single painting. All together, the box tells a story.

From 1981 to 2006, Mr. Hewett did a lot of the wood chests. They were all by commission and cost around $2,500 apiece. Carleton Sprague, a good friend and a talented fine craftsman, made the boxes out of poplar. The two designed the box years ago.

While the unpainted boxes might look similar, when Mr. Hewett gets a hold of it and starts painting, every box becomes unique. With a brush and oil-based paint, Mr. Hewett can do a lot of storytelling.

“Poplar is good furniture wood. There is no grain and there are no knots in the wood like you get with pine,” Mr. Hewett said. “I never really quit painting the boxes. I just slowed down a lot.”

His most recent box sits near a window in his second-floor studio. The box looks like a nicely done ancient sea chest. The lid on top is a painting of the familiar Vineyard Haven gaff-rigged sloop Venture, which once was owned by Nathaniel (Pat) West, the late commodore of the Holmes Hole Sailing Association.

Mr. Hewett said he was inspired to do the sea chest after seeing an old sea chest at the Martha’s Vineyard Community Services Thrift Shop in Vineyard Haven.

“It brought back memories of the pleasures of painting on these,” he said.

Every box tells a story. Some boxes depict a line in a children’s tale. Another is of toy-like ships. Mr. Hewett is a creative thinker and with a little bit of a shove from the customer, the artist’s work takes over the box.

He is highly visual and something is always happening in every painting. His work is almost bound by a quality of folk art, but with action. The strokes of the paint brush are delicately placed like that of an illustrator of years ago. A lot of detail can be found in his paintings.

Colors are vivid. The shapes are obviously hand-drawn and the final coat of paint carries the evidence of brush strokes.

Painting has been his passion since youth. Mr. Hewett’s painting career is longer than most of the Island’s contemporary artists have been alive. In a community of artists, he is the elder statesman, the fellow with the wisdom of years.

He started his training in the 1940s at the Cincinnati Art Academy as a portrait painter. He received a master’s degree in art from the University of Louisville. He has painted across Europe and America. He attributes his gift to being inspired and deeply touched by the work of mid-century artists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. From 1955 to 1970, he taught as a professor of painting at Ohio State University.

He has painted on the Vineyard for 35 years.

His wife, Jeanne Hewett, is an artist and manages to do with cloth what her husband does with paint.

Their home is an artist colony of two. The two always seem to be in the middle of creative endeavors. The two share a love for their flower gardens which this week were showing off plenty of color. Poppies were brilliant red. The lilacs and azaleas were also in bloom.

The artist’s work doesn’t stop at painting. This winter he completed two books, locally published by small presses.

He collaborated with Les Holcomb to publish a book called Spring Poems, published by Vineyard Handmade Books. The 40-page book of poems by the two men was edited by Ed Housman. Only 100 copies of the book are in the first press run. Mr. Hewett also contributed illustrations to the book.

A new book of Mr. Hewett’s cartoons, which will arrive in the Vineyard bookstores this month, is called Extremebirding. The book is a collection of funny little sketches done over the last three or four years. Each illustration has a quick punch line, a witty thought or quote. The book was put together with the help of Julie Kimball of West Meadow Press.

Mr. Hewett is finishing up a third book called 15 Poems by French Women of the Early 20th Century. The poems are translated to English. While the work is nearly done, Mr. Hewett isn’t quite certain how it will be published. He already has a working cover and title and a vision of how it will look when completed.

Throughout his career as a working artist, Mr. Hewett has expressed his creativity in many different ways. On the walls of his home are paintings reflecting different times, different streams of consciousness, different styles of painting.

In more recent years, he has done gold-colored paintings of circles he calls The Sun. The works have hung at the Dragonfly Gallery in Oak Bluffs and at other places on the Island.

Mr. Hewett, however, has hung in nearly all of the Island’s galleries. In 1982, he did an exhibit of his wood chests and sold every one. In that one exhibit were more than 20 boxes.

A familiar phrase that he has often used — “It is time to do something different” — captures the essence of his youthful hunger for adventure in visual art.

The phrase has followed him. A return to making wood chests is just another step in Mr. Hewett’s continuing walk through expression.