One of the area's most successful artists learned her trade on Tybee, then returned to practice it after a stellar career in high finance. 
Debbie Brady Robinson, whose sweet nature is reflected on her charmingly realistic canvasses, claims she has found happiness on the beach she cavorted about as a child.
"That's what Tybee is to me," she says. "It's Paradise."
But while her roots in both art and the island were planted early, her journey to their rediscovery was not as easy as the feather light strokes of her brush. 
Debbie, who radiates the iridescent nature of those who genuinely care, springs from a family laden with artistic talent.
"I grew up with art all around me," she says.
Her father, Jack Brady, a real estate broker who brought the family to Savannah from New Orleans when Debbie was six months old, painted and sketched much of his life.
He painted the walls of his daughter's room with fairy tale characters and created a canopy of an evening sky on the ceiling, sprinkling it with stars and constellations she could gaze upon it as she fell asleep to dream dreams of producing similar scenes from her own palette. 
A great aunt, Mary Lucille Brady, was an accomplished portrait artist in Savannah and an aunt, Corrine Brady Owen, and cousin, Beth Anderson Toth, are artists on Tybee. 
Cumulatively, they passed their passion for painting along to Debbie when she was still a tot.
"I never wanted to do or be anything but an artist," she says, flashing that invariably infectious smile while radiating the iridescent nature of one who genuinely cares about both her craft and humanity in general.
Debbie started early, drawing on scraps of paper for pleasure in her preschool days when other girls were playing with dolls and pursuing her penchant for painting after she started school at St. Michael's (her family moved to Tybee in 1963). 
Island artist Yon Swanson offered instruction to St. Michael's grammar school students and "I just loved those art lessons," she says. 
"It's funny, but I've talked with former schoolmates in recent years and they don't even remember the lessons."
But they made such an indelible impression on Debbie that she now returns to the school once a week to instruct students because "I want to give something back to the place that gave me so much."
After completing the eighth grade at St. Michael's in 1972, Debbie continued honing her artistic skills through high school at St. Vincent's and Savannah High, the latter being her first exposure to a public school.
Debbie demurely admits she transferred to Savannah High after her sophomore year because of a puppy love attraction to a male student there. 
While she thrived on her new found social exposure in public school, she says the education it provided was substantially below St. Vincent's standards. Debbie recalls attending her first English session at Savannah High and being convinced they had mistakenly assigned her to a remedial class. She later learned the class was really for advanced students and ultimately wound up skipping a year in the school. 
"I didn't get a lot of academic education there but I did get a good education in life," she chuckles (by the time of her early graduation, incidentally, the young love which prompted her transfer had long since gone by the boards).
Debbie painted the pictures which adorned the covers of school yearbooks and other publications for the two high schools.
She also produced hundreds of drawings and paintings in her spare time.
Most of her early work was tucked away in a large trunk stored away in an attic. Sadly, the trunk was subsequently misplaced.
"Nobody has seen it for years," she says.
Debbie credits Sally Bostwick, a noted Tybee artist for more than 40 years, with stoking the flames of her own artistic zeal. 
"It was her art that I saw around the island as a child," says Debbie. "I loved her work. You can look at one of her paintings and know it's Little Tybee. You just know the place. My attempts to capture the beauty of the island with my painting were inspired by her art."
Debbie fulfilled her desire to meet her idol only recently, when one of her art students turned out to be Sally's grandson. She had the boy take a note to his grandmother saying she wanted to meet her and purchase one of her paintings.
They finally got together at an art show last July. Debbie left that show with not only a new friend and fellow admirer but a long-coveted painting by Sally, much of whose recent work is now on display at the Tybee Arts Association's new Lighthouse Art Gallery on Butler Avenue.
Sally has just been named the association's Artist of the Month for March.
Debbie was instrumental in setting up the new gallery, which recently moved from its former site beside the Tybee Lighthouse. She is currently the association's vice president in charge of the gallery.
After high school Debbie moved on to major in art at Georgia Southern.
It was only after her sophomore year that she took the divergent path which led her business career.
That summer she returned to her New Orleans birth place and spent a lot of time witnessing and working with that city's large art community, members of which converge daily on Jackson Square.
"Many of them were excellent artists, ten times better than I was at the time," says the self-effacing Debbie. "It was so sad seeing them. They were almost starving and many of them were older people. I just couldn't see myself doing that. I knew I didn't want to be a starving artist."
Disenchanted and determined to avoid such a fate, Debbie hasstily changed her major to journalism and later business when she returned to Georgia Southern.
That move dramatically altered the course of her next 13 years.
Upon graduation, she was employed by the Great Southern Federal Bank, which later became First Federal Savings and Loan, starting her banking career as a loan servicing representative, then moving up quickly to the position of teller, new accounts rep, savings specialist, assistant branch manager, branch manager, assistant vice president and vice president.
In 1977, she was lured to Brunswick to help operate a branch bank for Savannah First Federal. First Georgia Bank later purchased the branch but kept Debbie on as its manager and later vice president of operations.
Now noted for her financial acumen, she was recruited to work with a Frederica Bank and Trust startup bank on St. Simon's Island, where she was placed in charge of everything but lending. 
By this time Debbie was motivated by financial success and, deciding the quickest route to riches was self employment, became a stock broker in Brunswick.
She rapidly built a list of 300 clients but learned equally rapidly that there was a downside to such success.
"I had thought there was a lot of stress in banking--most bankers do--but try being a stock broker and see what happens," she laughs. "I was working all the time, seven days a week, many times as late as 1 a.m., then took calls at my home at all hours of the night. I tried to handle every client as if they were my only one. Nobody had to worry about their money because I worried about it all the time. It killed me to see anybody lose any money."
While she was extremely successful she was unhappy and her stressful work wreaked havoc with her health. After five years of brokerage work it was literally killing her.
Debbie was hospitalized with off the scale high blood pressure and doctors learned that while in the hospital--as she was repeatedly--the pressure would drop to normal, then skyrocket again when she went back to work.
"It got to the point where I could feel it (a rise in her blood pressure) coming on, which is unusual," she said.
Ultimately, her doctor urged her to change her life, noting that if she continued in her occupation she could count on being dead within a year.
That warning, rendered in 1995, made an understandable impression on the financial wizard.
"I was devastated," she recalls. "I didn't know what to do and my clients kept calling me at home at all hours."
It was then that Debbie took a break, heading for her parents Tybee beach house to get her priorities in order.
"When I walked on the beach I knew this was my place," she recalls. "This was my Paradise!. I didn't want to be anywhere else."
Both Debbie's health and attitude improved and she shared this revelation with her husband, Mark, an industrial parts salesman then working out of their Brunswick home.
Mark concurred with his wife, took another job in industrial sales with a firm which needed a representative in the Savannah area, and joined Debbie on Tybee where she blossomed as she became immersed in her life-long love of art.
Debbie is a prolific producer, sometimes working on four or five projects simultaneously, painting in the wee morning hours between midnight and 4 a.m.
"That's the time when the phone doesn't ring and nobody's looking over your shoulder," she laughs. "Besides, I learned long ago that it was useless for me to try to sleep when a painting was on my mind."
Once back in stride, Debbie joined the Tybee Arts Assn. and was delighted to discover her work sold well.
"It's been a real surprise," she says. "I took a left turn but now I'm back doing the only thing I ever wanted to do. And I'm not starving! I couldn't be happier. And it takes a lot less money to live on Tybee than it does other places."
Working from her imagination, Debbie's paintings resonate with realism and she has no fear of running out of ideas.
"I'll never be able to paint everything that I want to paint," she says. "There are so many things I want to paint that if I had two life times I couldn't do it all." 
Frequently, she has limited edition lithograph prints made from her most popular paintings for sale to those who cannot afford her originals but are anxious to acquire her work.
Prints of her paintings of the island's new Pavilion and a montage of scenes from Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil have been her sales leaders. Dozens of the former prints have been sold to raise funds for the renovation of the Tybee Lighthouse and she gets frequent requests to "re-mark" prints, painting original images of those who purchase them on the reproduction.
While Debbie does excellent work in oil and watercolors, she uses acrylics as her principal medium because she prefers to paint rapidly and says working with oil is too slow. 
Her are now displayed in shops throughout the area and into South Florida, as far as Venice and Sarasota, where she has recently been requested to put on a one-woman show.
She's also semi-back in business as manager of the new Lighthouse Art Gallery, though she expects to spend less time there once it is firmly established.
"But I'll always be here on the weekends," she says. "Those are the busiest times." 
Her husband has recently joined her in making art a family occupation.
Mark, who started framing his wife's art some time ago, turned out to be an outstanding craftsman and became enamored of the work.
"He's great at it," says Debbie. "He's so meticulous."
Fellow artists concurred and Mark got so many requests to do their framing that he has opened his own business, "The Hall of Frames", in a room off the main display area in the gallery.
"We both love the work and the island and I just want to keep on doing what I'm doing forever," says Debbie. "I couldn't be happier."
Who could be after finding their personal Paradise?