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Donald Bryan has been a full time resident of Nags Head since 1973. He was born in Pennsylvania but spent much of his youth in Tucson, Arizona. He left Tucson in early 1942 to start an Air Force career during which he began to record his travels on canvas.

After leaving the military service, Bryan and his wife established their home and his studio in Nags Head where he served as a Town Commissioner and Mayor from the mid-seventies until the early nineties.

The artist was largely self-taught until a tour of duty in Germany. There he spent his free time for almost three years working under Herr Ernst Krupp, whose instruction gave Bryan’s paintings new life and dimension.

Bryan has been a regular participant in group and one-man shows regionally, from the Outer Banks to Washington DC. Several of his paintings were hung in a US House of Representatives hearing room for over ten years.

“In my paintings I do my best to capture the spirit of the coastal life style as well as the beauty in the commonplace which surrounds all of us; a field or bouquet of flowers, an aging face, a decaying building or the working boats and the implements people use to make their living. My aim is to record that beauty and to help others see it.”