Community members are invited to a memorial service for Robin Clair on Friday, from 5 to 7 p.m. at Our Place in Coral Bay, St. John.
The event includes a silent auction of her artwork, which will benefit the St. John Kids and the Sea Marine programs. Clair’s paintings and email bidding instructions are available here.
Clair, who died last August, was the force behind the Kids and the Sea Program, according to Jenn Robinson, who served with Clair on the nonprofit organization’s board for decades. “Behind that small person was a big soul. She was an inspiration for all of us,” Robinson said.
Clair and her spouse, Fletcher Pitts, arrived in the islands as liveaboards on their wooden schooner Liberty in 1986. She took a job managing a rental complex in Estate Zootenvaal, now known as the Beach House.
A year after they arrived in the Virgin Islands, three young Boy Scouts drowned in a boating accident off a small cay in the Pillsbury Sound. “The Rotary clubs in the territory teamed up with the sailing communities to develop KATS programs to teach basic seamanship so that this tragedy could never happen again,” Robinson said. In 1988, Clair and Pitts launched the program on St. John.
Robinson estimates that close to 700 youngsters have gone through KATS programs on St. John. They begin with basic seamanship and rowing skills and move on to learn more advanced sailing skills. Many have become skilled boaters and work in the marine industry, and at least one has competed as an Olympian.
Clair was well known as a sailor, competing in regattas throughout the Caribbean. Although she was less known as a painter, “She was always an artist,” said Robinson. “Before she arrived on St. John, she worked as a high school art teacher, but it’s hard to have a studio aboard a boat. Eventually she and Fletcher built a cabin in Estate Carolina, and that became her studio.”
Her talent as an artist did not escape Priscilla Hintz Rivera and David Knight Jr., owners of Bajo El Sol Gallery and Art Bar. In July 2025, they held a show featuring Clair’s work, and viewers were astonished by her meticulous, colorful paintings.
“From action painting to color fields, Clair’s work reaches for harmony via the emotional and intellectual balance found in nature. Ideas from the fine arts and science present an exchange of ideas and an order arranged by abstraction on her structured canvases,” the gallery owners wrote of her work.
A month after the show, Clair fell ill, her condition worsened, and she died shortly after. It was her wish that her paintings benefit the sailing program to which she had dedicated much of her life.
