Anthony Benton Gude was 21 before he realized he could paint for a living. He was working construction jobs at the time and in retrospect there were already hints. “If we had to re-plaster I always mixed the paints,” he said, “and if we needed a rendering, I did that.”

But it wasn’t until his mother suggested art college that it occurred to him he could do the same job as his grandfather, Thomas Hart Benton.

The mouth-opening view at the Benton family property, which looks out on Menemsha pond from the end of a grassy lane off State Road, is depicted in several Thomas Hart Benton paintings. The Regionalist pioneer liked to paint the Island’s gentle hills and stone walls, along with its gray scrub oaks and craggy coast line.

His grandson doesn’t. Though he paints bucolic landscapes in murals and oil paintings, he likes his light different.

“It’s cold and sharp here,” said Mr. Gude, sitting in the front room of grandfather’s old studio yesterday. “In Kansas though, when the sun shines, it sticks to the landscape.”

Though he spent much of his childhood here Mr. Gude, 44, now lives on the family farm three hours out of Kansas City, occasionally making the five-hour drive to one of the galleries in Missouri that regularly show his work.

He is also a storm chaser. The recent bout of violent weather in Kansas left him on generator power for a month at the farm, but it provided good work material.

“I’m trying to get close enough to hear one roar,” he said. “That’s my goal in life.”

The front room walls are lined with works by both Bentons. An oil painting of Anthony’s mother, Jessie, as an 18-year-old, hangs over the fireplace, near to a 2007 landscape of New Mexico. The building now is rented out in the summer; it is refitted as a studio only when Mr. Gude is on Island long enough to justify transporting his materials from Kansas, which is not often. He is here now for two weeks preparing for the opening this Sunday of a show at Carol Craven Gallery in Vineyard Haven of his oil paintings. He has brought the two youngest of his four children.

“I was watching them yesterday,” he said, “and I thought, ‘That’s four generation of Bentons that have clammed that shore.’”

Mr. Gude traveled around as a child, spending long summers here and then being home-schooled as the family traveled around for their construction business. While his sisters went on to high school he continued home schooling until he got his general educational development (GED) qualification. He would do intensive schooling from September to May and then spend long summers on the Island, where he could mix with other children and spend long days playing on the docks of Menemsha village.

“There was never any supervision,” he said. “You could do what you wanted.”

He remembers that his grandfather got up to paint at dawn, as he does, and worked all day, either painting or building a sea wall at the end of the property, even well into his 80s. Then he would come up to the house for a martini or bourbon.

“I have great memories of Tom and [his wife] Rita, but I was too young to be interested in painting,” he said. “I was encouraged to draw a lot. Everyone in the family was artistic.”

He was considering college to study something academic when his mother suggested art school. He attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Art Students League in New York.

“I learned the tools of my trade there,” he said, “the nuts and bolts of creating a good light source from the Venetian masters. It was an important part of what I would be working with.

He is a fastidious worker, spending weeks researching his historical works. He carries a sketchbook, and — though he doesn’t like the color limitations or the 35 mm frame — he uses a digital camera to photograph promising details. Eventually he lays down a full size sketch. Then he starts a layering process he learned at school.

While on the Island he has suspended commissioned work on a six-by-nine-foot mural of a 1914 train wreck in Tipton Ford, Missouri. The train was carrying home celebrants from an emancipation day event. When it collided with a freight train, the gas-engine vehicle was consumed by flames. The bodies were so charred that no-one could tell black from white, so the victims were buried together at a mixed race funeral.

“The region was still fully segregated,” he said, “so this was a rare example of unity.”

He is building the canvas mounted on plywood frame, to accommodate the Methodist organization’s plan to transport the painting between churches.

Doing civic work and commission painting means that Mr. Gude has to work to specifications.

“Some clients are very stubborn about what they’d like to see,” he said.

One client contacted his agent to arrange a commission after buying some art from a Missouri gallery. He liked a oil painting of some mushrooms — only he wanted something bigger, to fit in his new house. While Mr. Gude painted a variation on the same theme — even including the mushrooms — he didn’t dream he was being asked for a blown-up replica. The client sent it back.

“He said ‘I ordered steak and I got pork chops,’” the artist recalled. Mr. Gude apologized for the confusion and cancelled the contract.

Now he is strict about being inspired by his subject matter. For one thing, it makes business sense.

“If it’s something I wanted to do, I know I can sell it somewhere else,” he said.

On the whole, he has been lucky with his clients. In 1991 he was commissioned to build four murals, two measuring six-by-sixteen feet, and two at six-by-twenty-four feet, before building had even started.

“It kind of fell in my lap,” said the painter. He uses this phrase repeatedly, clearly aware of the advantage his grandfather’s name gives him.

“It can either be a stigma, or something to be proud of,” he said. “I’m inadvertently following him and his footsteps.”

Two of his most significant recent pieces were commissioned in Neosho, the small Missouri town where his grandfather was born.

“It’s one thing to be his grandson but if I’m producing works the community thinks are that good,” he said, “it puts me not in his shadow but beside it.”