Ovid Ward, the well-known Vineyard artist, boat designer and sculptor, died June 17 at the Martha’s Vineyard Hospital. He was 75. The cause was a collapsed lung following years of treatment for cancer, his sister Beth Ward Tritsarolis said Monday.
The descendant of a whaler and a member of the Osborn family of Edgartown, Mr. Ward was an artist of wide repute whose work spanned a variety of genres, including seascapes, landscapes, sculptures and architectural renderings.
He painted from his own photographs and had recently made a series of limited edition fish prints for the Martha’s Vineyard Striped Bass and Bluefish Derby. He also was a boat designer and had built some two dozen sport-fishing boats of his own design, including a speed boat that he piloted himself around the Island in record time.
A permanent example of his work is public art: a full-scale fluke whale tail sounding that was installed in 1993 near the Old Sculpin Gallery on the Edgartown harbor.
Ovid Osborn Ward was born on Feb. 10, 1945, in Charlestown, W.V. His mother was Elizabeth Osborn Ward, a descendant of Thomas Mayhew and one of 11 children who had grown up in a house on the Edgartown harbor.
He grew up in Roanoake, Va.,and came every summer with his family to the Vineyard, where at a young age he became fascinated with boats and the water.
In the late 1960s he graduated from the Art Center School of Design in California with a master’s degree in industrial design, and went to work for Chrysler, followed by Hatteras Yachts and Crestline. He later began painting “to have something to hang on the walls,” according to an account on his website, and friends encouraged him to sell his work.
He moved to the Vineyard permanently in 1974 and continued his work as a designer and visual artist for the next four-plus decades. In 1990 he turned exclusively to visual arts, ever attracted to the changing light and waters around the Island.
“Part of my success is largely due to the accuracy in detail, proportions, and scale of the boats in my paintings,” he wrote in a statement on his website. “The rigging is right, the perspective is right and the water looks real because of my experience designing and building boats and growing up on the Vineyard.
“I’ve always thought my paintings will be considered slices of history in the future because they are accurate and represent the realism of the surroundings that I paint.”
When he created the full-scale fluke tail — fashioned from leftover boat-building materials — he also created miniature reproductions in cold cast bronze.
He showed his work in Vineyard galleries, but was mostly a private person and rarely did interviews.
“Ovid loved the ocean and boats as I do,” said Louisa Gould, who showed his work at her Vineyard Haven gallery. “He was able to capture the movement and feeling of the water as only a seaman and true artist can do.”
The Vineyard was in his blood, his sister Ms. Tritsarolis told the Gazette by phone Monday.
“He just always felt pulled to the Vineyard, it was in his soul,” she said. “He wasn’t always happy there, because it can be hard to live on the Island, but he was just pulled to be there.”
Mr. Ward was interred Monday in the New Westside Cemetery in Edgartown.
Per his wishes, no services will be held.
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