Painting ought to come naturally to West Tisbury’s John Athearn. George Brehm, the Saturday Evening Post cover illustrator and children’s book illustrator, was his grandfather. George’s brother, Worth, also a Post cover illustrator and children’s book illustrator, was his great uncle. His aunt June Tabor of Chilmark is a painter. His niece Morgan Taylor is a graphic artist. And West Tisbury painter Allen Whiting is a third cousin.

Little Johnny Athearn was eight when his grandfather saw him trying to paint on crumpled typing paper with a box of children’s paints.

“No, no, no,” John remembers his grandfather’s saying. “That won’t do at all. Come with me,” and he took his grandson to his studio and gave him watercolor paper and brushes and tubes of watercolor paint.

“And every Christmas after that my mother — she was George Brehm’s daughter — made sure that there were art supplies among the presents,” he recalled.

In the West Tisbury, in which he grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, there were artists everywhere, encouraging their children and their children’s friends to enjoy and experiment with art.

“Every summer Tom Maley and Max and Coney Kahn and Bob Schwartz and Bob Rabinowitz would be here,” he recalled.

“Bob Rabinowitz was a lot of fun because he’d paint outdoors and get so excited out in the field with an accent of color he was putting into a painting. And I grew up with Simon and Peter Huntington, and their father was Will Huntington, who did illustrations and he was very open to letting us come and be in his studio as long as we were quiet. He always kept a box of scrap paper from da Rosa’s for us to draw on, and Max Kahn would let us paint on canvas with oils in his studio. Then we had a great art game in which each one of us would draw a head and fold it over and pass it to the next person who’d draw a neck and fold it over and pass it on until we got all the way down to the feet. And Katie Kahn would draw elaborate backgrounds for the creature. You can imagine what some of them looked like!”

John also remembers when Tom Maley began constructing the sculptures that now enliven the Field Gallery grounds.

“In the beginning, they were made with mops for hair and of driftwood and bed posts,” he said.

The Maley home was an especially inviting place to play, too, because Helen Maley taught early childhood education at Wheelock College and knew just how to entertain children. She kept a mystery chest of costumes for West Tisbury youngsters with a theatrical bent to dress up in on rainy days.

Artist Stan Murphy, his wife Polly and their children lived on Middle Road, too, while New York Times art critic Tom Craven was just across Music street from the Athearn house and would welcome the youngsters to see the art on his walls. A frequent guest was Midwestern painter Thomas Hart Benton, who had a Chilmark house and had encouraged his fellow Midwesterners, the Brehm brothers, to come to the Vineyard.

John Athearn’s own first claim to artistic fame came in 1970 when he graduated from the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School and was dubbed the most artistic boy in his class. He went from there to Roger Williams College in Rhode Island, Cape Cod Community College and to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst where he got a degree in elementary education before returning to the Island to be a kindergarten teacher’s assistant at the Edgartown School.

He was thinking about painting a lot in those years, though he wasn’t actually painting. He was always, however, driving around absorbing Island landscapes, but he was too busy teaching and working summers on his brother Jim’s and sister in law Debbie’s Morning Glory Farm in Edgartown, and working the farm of his own in Chilmark. There Jim kept cows and John had pigs and goats. But his role in those days, he felt, was to encourage the children in his classes to draw and enjoy art.

And he apparently succeeded. He treasures a note from former pupil Tara Reynolds, who now has her own graphic design business in Edgartown, that says: “Ever since doing art with Mr. Athearn, I’ve wanted to be an artist.”

But now that he’s retired, John Athearn is painting in earnest himself and his postage-stamp and a bit larger than postcard-sized watercolors of Island fields and moors and ponds and barrier beaches are on sale at Morning Glory Farm. He does not name his paintings. He wants them to be what their viewers want them to be. All the proceeds from the sale of his work go to the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School art department to provide scholarships to students interested in art, and to Felix Neck for camp scholarships, and to the Farm Institute for scholarships.

He does all his painting at home — after making mental notes of colors and shapes — as he makes his rounds of the Island. His little Music street house abounds in family memorabilia — a painting of his mother, Elizabeth, by her father, Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn with illustrations by his grandfather and great uncle, and pictures of the original Brehm property in Chilmark, bought in the 1920s after the Brehm brothers, from Noblesville, Ind., had been lured to the Island by Tom Benton’s descriptions of the Vineyard’s rolling hills. He also told them that they could buy an old farm on the Vineyard for virtually nothing.

So George Brehm and his wife Katherine bought 160 acres on North Road, a mile out of Menemsha, and Roger Allen built a stone house for them there. They called it Little Peaked. Before that they had owned a house on the Menemsha Crossroad named Bethaven after their daughter Elizabeth. At a party Elizabeth Brehm met Elmer (Mike) Athearn; they were married and moved to California. Mike served in New Guinea in World War II. When the war was over, they moved to West Tisbury to the house where John and his brothers, George and Jim, and his sister Connie grew up. Meanwhile, Worth Brehm had married the widowed Jane Look Cowan, widow of illustrator Percy Cowan, and was also living in West Tisbury.

Today John Athearn the artist, surrounded by family art, books and belongings, enjoys reminiscing about his Island forebears, who were Mayhews and Looks, almost as much as he likes sitting in his little kitchen, cheerily doing the paintings he has looked forward to doing all his life.