Like most people who think of Martha’s Vineyard as a very special place, Linda Besse started visiting the Vineyard at a very early age, just after she turned one. For every July growing up, her family traveled from Rhode Island to spend the whole month of July here. This was nothing new for the Besse extended family. Her father Alden Besse spent summers sailing and racing on the Vineyard with his brothers Arthur and Richard. Linda’s grandfather,  Arthur Besse, Sr. helped start the Vineyard Haven Yacht Club and her great-grandfather was the second owner of Oak House in Oak Bluffs. When Linda’s parents moved to Martha’s Vineyard in 1990 on family land owned since the 1930s, it gave her an excuse to come back to a place that holds very fond memories.
  
Linda Besse has been a full time artist since 1999. Winning numerous awards, her paintings are in homes and offices on four
continents. Painting exclusively in oil because she likes its luminosity, depth, and intensity of color, Linda uses a mostly wet-on-wet technique to capture the immediacy of the image.

To gather reference for her paintings, Linda has traveled to every U.S. state, 35 countries, and all seven continents and every year returns to the Vineyard. Linda has traversed remote tundra in Labrador researching the caribou migration, been dropped off by float plane to salmon-filled streams to watch grizzly bears in Alaska, paddled 459 miles above the Arctic Circle on the Noatak River, and snorkeled with wild beluga whales in Hudson Bay.