When Julija Mostykanova Feeney first came to Nantucket from her tiny village in Lithuania with nothing but a backpack in the summer of 2001, her plan was to stay just for the high season, then return home and continue studying chemistry at her university. To make ends meet, the twenty year-old not only shared a room with two other young women in Madaket, but a bed. Then September came, but not her departure. The island had cast its spell. A couple of winters later, Julija (pronounced YOOL-ya) took a painting course at the Artists Association of Nantucket to meet new people and improve her English. But fate had something different in mind than just a way to fill in the cold, gray months.

“I immediately saw her talent,” says Julija’s first painting teacher at AAN, Katie Trinkle Legge. “She was so modest about her abilities, but it was impossible to hide.” Fast forward to the present. “She’s probably one of our top three bestsellers annually,” says AAN Artistic Director Bobby Frazier. “That’s out of about 120 active artists. She’s a big deal.” Laurie Champion, a keeneyed collector and AAN patron, agrees. “Ten years from now,” she says, “I would think Julija’s going to be in some major galleries in New York…she’s really astonishing.”

Julija is already represented at both Robert Foster Fine Art on India Street and Nantucket Looms on Main, as well as at Ampersand Interiors in Upper Montclair, New Jersey. And her stock is about to rise further. On July 16th, Julija will be the honoree at AAN’s annual gala at the Great Harbor Yacht Club, “a huge night for avid collectors,” says the organization’s executive director, Courtney Bridges. “Folks plan their trip specifically” to be able to attend the event. It’s an opportunity to speak with the feted artist, raise funds for emerging artists and help sponsor classes, and bid at a live auction on works both by the featured honoree and other high-quality artists—“the island’s best talent all in one place,” as Bridges puts it.

At Julija’s Tom Nevers home, an oil studio takes up much of the basement, while an acrylics studio fills out the upstairs. With paintings in different stages of completion and toys belonging to her one-year-old toddler, Quinn, strewn about, the artist acknowledges the “huge honor” about to be bestowed on her. She also is grateful to AAN for supporting her through her career and moving it forward not only through professional workshopping and persistent encouragement but also by dint of the enduring, nurturing friendships and sense of community the organization has afforded her over the years.

“We meet for art critiques, we do birthdays together— it’s just amazing,” she says. Still, she is nervous about the distinction of being this year’s AAN honoree. “I just don’t like to be the center of attention,” she comments. “It doesn’t feel comfortable when all the looks are at you.”

She is much more comfortable talking about the work itself, how she started out doing very realistic paintings, “very representational,” and how that began to evolve into something more abstracted, looser. “Now I paint just kind of from my memory,” she says, “from my mind. It feels more freeing. You come to the canvas every day, and you don’t know what’s going to happen. You don’t have an apple and a vase in front of you. That, I think, keeps it interesting. I just love to attack the canvas.” She adds, “I start tons of paintings at the same time. It makes me feel good. My energy for painting is kind of frenetic.”

Robert Foster, principal of Robert Foster Fine Art, remembers well Julija’s apple-and-vase period. When she first started, he says, “she did very traditional kinds of Flemish/Dutch still lifes. Now, twenty years later, she’s mostly known for her abstracts. Abstract work on Nantucket had always been hit or miss, but when Julija jumped in there and did it—very successfully—she paved the way for a lot of other local artists.” Her first AAN painting teacher, Trinkle Legge, agrees, saying “there are developing painters on the island who are now emulating her work.”

In addition to abstracts, much of what Julija turns out these days are abstracted landscapes. “You can see that there’s a road,” she says, “maybe a suggestion of the beach, the sky. There’s a horizon line somewhere. I also sometimes paint paintings of my childhood home.” (That home stands about 50 miles from the Baltic Sea; Trinkle Legge recalls that Julija “had a photo of her little brother standing under a tree, and there may have been a house in the background.”)

What connoisseurs see in her works is a feeling of calm, indicates AAN’s director of adult programming, Elizabeth Congdon. “It feels in sync with Nantucket, with wanting peace and tranquility in your life,” she says. “Her paintings are very healing.” Foster likens looking at her paintings to “sitting and looking at the water at that certain time of day when the blue is just kind of magical.” Frazier, too, says that what resonates is “the sense of peace.”

Julija appreciates the positive reception of her art, but what she prizes at least as much is the knowledge that “when I wake up every day, I can’t wait to go to work. So many people don’t have that.” She credits the island for her good fortune. “Nantucket is such a supportive community both in terms of fellow artists and collectors,” she says. “It would be very hard to be a full-time artist elsewhere.”

To see Julija’s work and that of many other talented island artists, attend the Artists Association of Nantucket annual gala at the Great Harbor Yacht Club on July 16. Tickets are available at nantucketarts.org.