2026 Featured Artist – Vida Miller
Photograph by: Southern Brilliance Photography LLC
2026 Featured Artist – Vida Miller
By Sarah Rose
In celebration of the Georgetown Wooden Boat Show’s 37th anniversary on October 17-18, the South Carolina Maritime Museum board is proud to announce that this year’s featured artist is local treasure, Vida Miller. Posters and t-shirts depicting her work can be purchased throughout the event, during which thousands of visitors flock to historic Front Street and Harborwalk to view over 100 wooden boats ranging in size from kayaks to classic cruisers, watch the rowing relay, peruse vendor tents and enjoy food and beverages.
Growing up in Greenville, South Carolina, Miller loved painting. In the mid-1970s, she started taking lessons from instructors at the Greenville County Museum of Art. Over the years, she continued to practice the skills she had learned.
When a friend invited her to visit Litchfield Beach in 1974, Miller was struck by the beauty and magic of the Lowcountry and inspired by the coastal Carolina landscape, she moved to the area. Returning to her artistic roots, she studied watercolors under the tutelage of Bruce Chandler and other talented artists from around the country. In 1980, she opened the Gray Man Gallery in Pawleys Island.
Along the way, Miller was elected to the Georgetown County School Board, on which she served for eight years. That experience, along with being raised in the world of politics, led her to run for the House of Representatives, where as a State Representative, she carried District 108 from 1996-2010. While representing approximately 60,000 constituents with an emphasis on advocating for the arts, education and conservation, Miller found that she no longer had the time to paint.
After a fourteen-year tenure at the State House she once again began attending artist workshops, where she explored many mediums. Having won many awards across the state, she served on the South Carolina Arts Alliance Board, as Regional Director of South Carolina Watercolor Society, as President of the Georgetown Watercolor Society and as a board member of the Waccamaw Arts and Craft Guild. She is currently a Member with Excellence of the South Carolina Watercolor Society, is on the board of the South Carolina Arts Foundation and is also the Chairman of the Board at the Georgetown Rice Museum, where her prints are available for purchase. Her work is on display at Gray Man Gallery and at the Old Town Hall on Pawleys Island.
In her spare time, Miller enjoys spending time with her husband, Michael Carter, and their family. She has recently taken up pottery. “Everyone should have a creative hobby that brings them happiness, whether that’s cooking, sewing, gardening or woodworking –with so much going on in the world, we all need to find more joy,” she said. “For me, it’s painting because it’s therapeutic to sit with a brush or pastel and a piece of paper and within an hour or two to have created something I enjoy.”
For Miller, the best part of being an artist is finding inspiration in nature and working with her hands. Having explored many mediums over the decades, she said that while she often returns to watercolor, her true love is pastel. “After painting in watercolors and mixed media for years, I have thoroughly enjoyed pastels –the jewel-toned pigment is so exciting to work with, especially for the wonderful landscapes of the Lowcountry,” she explained. “Pastel is one of the oldest mediums in the world –Renaissance artists painted with it because although it’s incredibly messy, when you put the color on, that’s the color you get, rather than with oil or acrylic that darkens as it dries, or watercolor that lightens during the process.”
These days, Miller is more relaxed about the finished product and starting this fall, she plans to get back to painting more originals in the spacious studio behind her home. A tour of her workspace revealed a wall of windows overlooking a private garden blooming with flowers and a bird sanctuary set against a copse of trees. A collection of books, top-of-the-line pastels, ceramic vases, glazes, pots of brushes and a stack of Charleston baskets occupy open shelving and a desk, while prints from Miller’s wholesale line are laid out across a large table, waiting to be shipped. A special space reserved for a kiln is tucked safely away from the workshop.
Miller pointed out that the wood-paneled walls, hung with award-winning ribbons and festival posters, were once the bleachers in the gymnasium at Winyah High School in Georgetown before they were ripped out and replaced by metal seating. When her husband learned the planks were destined for the dump, he loaded them onto the back of his truck and took them to their home where he stripped the wood of chewed bubble gum and carved initials before treating and installing the panels.
That nostalgia –and a deep appreciation for local history– are what inspired Miller’s pastel painting for this year’s wooden boat show. The image is of a rustic old wooden boat moored in front of the iconic Renee Cathou fish house. “I chose that building because I knew many of the fishermen and shrimpers, the stories that they told and the friendships that were made inside those walls,” she said. “Those old buildings on the water take a beating down there, and my hope is that the painting, which symbolizes an important part of Georgetown’s local economy as well as its history, will preserve happy memories of what makes Georgetown so unique.”
She added, “It’s an honor to be selected and I’m humbled by the South Carolina Maritime Museum board’s confidence in me to create a piece that will benefit the museum.”
Miller’s painting will be auctioned off at the Goat Island Yacht Club Regatta Auction the Friday of the show.