Chilmark artist Jules S. Worthington believes the creativity that drives him is fundamental. It is the breath of life, in good times and not so good times.

His home off Tea Lane overflows with signs of it. Every wall, from the kitchen to the den, has his paintings on display. They are bright, big and colorful.

He built the house himself, from scratch, starting in 1980 and finishing it in 1988. He calls it his one and only dream house. It sits on top of a hill, a geological Island feature often described as “the backbone of Martha’s Vineyard.” From 250 feet above sea level, the view towards the north shore is stunning. His studio is on the top floor, where Mr. Worthington can look out on Vineyard Sound and the Elizabeth Islands in the distance.

Here at the 3 1/2 acre pine and oak property, Mr. Worthington gets the silence of the Island he likes. “I only hear the birds,” he said.

“Coming into the house, you’d think the art is done by five different artists,” Mr. Worthington said, looking around him.

“They are all me. It is just different stages in my life.”

His more recent paintings of the Vineyard look as though they are the oldest. The Vineyard appears as it looked maybe 60 years ago. The landscapes are vivid and largely absent of flashy cars, utility poles and power lines, harking back to an Island which was simpler. “I want to recreate what it was like in the 1950s. I do a lot of Menemsha. I love the sea. I love the marine, the rural.”

To accomplish the feel and look of an earlier time, Mr. Worthington edits the real scenes he chooses. “I take the outboard motors off the boats, because I don’t want you to know what the time was,” he said. “I am creating life back in the 1950s; those were my golden years here.”

It was during those early years that Mr. Worthington was a sailor. He has memories of racing at the helm out of Vineyard Haven harbor in a Vineyard 15 sailboat with his brother James, Denys Wortman and James Cagney Jr., the son of the actor. They had great times on the water and this helped solidify his love for the Island and its connection to the water.

For those who know him as the talented oil painter who turns out colorful expressionist realist paintings of Vineyard scenes year after year, they only know a part of a much bigger creative journey.

His paintings range from cubic designs, to graphic layout that can resemble poster art, to expressionist landscapes. In his studio, bathed by a northern exposed light, Mr. Worthington displays kinetic clocks, clocks that hang on the wall, that don’t look like clocks. Each clock has a different graphic image that changes with the moving of time. No hour is like the next. A poster of a Van Gogh hangs on the wall; so do personal pictures.

Many would seek to connect their creative life with their day-to-day affairs; Mr. Worthington has done it. At 72, he seems always to have done things his way, whether he was playing the violin as a child or working on a painting this week.

“In life you do something. You do it well. The mistake many people make is to sit on it, to sit on the golden egg. That is when you lose your creativity,” Mr. Worthington said. “The mistake artists make is to keep doing what you are doing.”

Gallery owners often urge their artists to stay the same. “They say, ‘Everybody likes those,’” he said. “They’ll say you have to keep painting like that, keep producing, keep doing what people love. But I have these things in my head,” he said. “I am trying to take art to another level and that is what is exciting. That has always saved my life.”

He recalled the story told by a teacher of his, who suggested that if everyone loves your work, you could benefit by working on it more.

In the pursuit of art, the mission isn’t about making others happy, though that is nice. The mission is about reaching beyond what one can touch. Mr. Worthington said in the journey to create, the message is to “let loose” and find the child within.

He grew up summers on the Vineyard. “My family first came to the Vineyard in 1949. I moved here in 1956.”

Throughout his life, he said, he exhibited creative rebellion. As a child, he learned the violin and grew up surrounded by classical music; his sister, Caroline Worthington, is a celebrated cellist. But it wasn’t duplicating the music of others that was artistically alluring to him. “I wasn’t thinking of the guy who wrote the music, I was thinking about what I wanted to do,” he said.

Mr. Worthington said his mother, Eleanor Piacenza, urged him to go to art school when he was young, well before he thought he wanted to be an artist. She loved his drawings. But he resisted art school. When he enrolled in Trinity College in Hartford, he was intent on a pre-med path. The he took a course in western art. “I got so excited, I changed my major.”

Mr. Worthington went to graduate school at the University of Hawaii and majored in design, thinking it was a sensible route to make a living. “I needed more than painting, I wanted to learn design, I wanted to learn something else.” All it did, he said, was make him a better artist and deepen his love for the image and two-dimensional art. It also added another ingredient:

“All artists are inventors,” he said. His artistic journey has brought him closer to the creative drive of his grandfather.

“My grandfather, George Worthington, was an inventor. He made some significant inventions. He invented the tubular construction for the bicycle. His discovery had all kinds of ramifications,” Mr. Worthington said.

Since 2002, Mr. Worthington has had two medical afflictions. Both, he believes, could have killed him. He was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2002 and spent the next two years trying to beat it with alternative medicine. “It took a lot of my time. It was a big distraction. I was bound and determined to win,” he said. As part of the strict regimen of alternative medicine treatment, he even got back to playing the violin.

He gives considerable credit to his wife, Judith Gersh, who is also a creative soul. She is a celebrated baker and an avid gardener.

Two years ago, he came down with transverse myelitis, a paralyzing inflammation of the spinal cord. At the time, the thought that he had Lyme arthritis. He was paralyzed from the chest down. The affliction was scary, not unlike a stroke.

To watch him walk around the house now, he looks fully cured. “I am still numb, but the nerves are slowly coming back,” he said, noting a lot of physical therapy and attention have helped. “I am really pushing for a whole recovery,” he said, including a full regimen of creative work.

“Every day I wake up, I look forward to painting. I feel so lucky. I didn’t get filthy rich painting, but that doesn’t matter. What matters to me is my lifestyle, that is what I want. The creative process feeds on itself. Once you start, you can’t stop it.”

Recently Mr. Worthington had an exhibit at the Martha’s Vineyard Savings Bank in Chilmark. He has held an exhibit there in his hometown bank for 30 years now. Later in the summer he will exhibit at the Vineyard Artisans Labor Day Show. In both places, he feels a keen connection to his friends.

“I like it because I get to see the people I haven’t seen, except at Cronig’s,” he said.