West Waters, former owner of Codder’s Furniture Co. in Wellfleet and a self-taught artist, died suddenly on Feb. 24, 2024 at his home in King and Queen County, Virginia. The cause was a heart attack. He was 66.

The son of the late Richard David Waters and Maria (Manos) Waters, West was born on April 9, 1957 in Washington, D.C. His father, a Methodist minister and social activist, worked in theater for social change in civil rights and to protest the Vietnam War.

West spent his early years in Washington and Providence before coming to Wellfleet in 1963 when his father was called to serve the churches in Wellfleet and Eastham. In 1964, Richard formed the Fisherman Players, which performed plays that he wrote.

According to West’s brother Robert, “Actors came from all over the country to do summer theater. There were always at least 20 people in the house.” Richard wrote The Abelard with Pascal Tehakmakian, worked with Norman Mailer to dramatize Mailer’s Why Are We in Vietnam?, and helped former attorney general Francis Biddle write The Trial of William Penn.

West’s childhood was immersed in the arts. “When our father wrote parts for children, he’d put us on stage,” said Robert. Seeds of artistic ambition were planted in those years, but they did not begin to grow until much later.

West graduated in 1975 from Nauset High School, where he played on the basketball and baseball teams. He graduated from Virginia Wesleyan College in 1984. By that time, his parents had returned to Virginia, and West joined them there before heading to Wisconsin to work for his uncle’s furniture business, Porters of Racine.

In the early ’90s, Robert fell ill, and West returned to Wellfleet to help with his business. He opened his own furniture business, called Codder’s, on Route 6. By 2007, he had decided he had waited long enough to pursue his own life in the arts, so he shut down his business and dedicated his life to painting, “to invest in himself,” as he put it on his website.

“West cobbled together his art education,” Robert said, learning by trial and error and seeking guidance from artists and taking art classes. He studied with the realist Robert K. Rourk of the Winstanley-Rourk Gallery in Dennis, who commented that, although West was “impatient,” he had “the drive to become a good artist.”

He found Johanna LaRance, an artist from Taos, N.M. who had retired to a small cottage by the sea, and persuaded her to work with him; he learned from the abstract colorist Maggie Lesignieur; and in Virginia he worked with the Norfolk impressionist Charles Kello.

In 2009, West bought his Virginia farmhouse and turned the upstairs into a studio. Because King and Queen County has no towns (there are four unincorporated communities) and its population is smaller today than it was in 1790, there was little marketing opportunity locally, West established a website and had one-man shows in the lobby of an office building in Virginia Beach.

In recent years, West worked on a family history, expanding a manuscript that his mother had been writing when she died. The manuscript remains unfinished, but the family is working with the Wellfleet Historical Society, which houses many of Richard David Waters’s scripts and other papers, to mount an exhibit on the Fisherman Players.

West is survived by his brothers, Micah Waters of Racine, Wisc., Robert Waters and partner Tami Francis of Wellfleet, and HJ Kaylor of Portsmouth, N.H.; nephews and nieces Joshua Waters and partner Alexis MacArthur of Eastham, Kelly Hautanen and partner Davin of Wellfleet, Kristen Sebastian and partner Adam of Eastham, and Chelsea Micks and partner Colby Henrique of Truro. He is also survived by his best friend, Eddie O’Brien of Virginia Beach, Va.

He was predeceased by his nephew Jason Waters.

A celebration of West’s life is planned for the spring in Wellfleet.