The first summer Ron Watson opened gWatson Gallery on the second floor of a storefront in Stonington, he sat outside on a bench at street level, right next to the ice cream stand, and watched tourists go by. Not many noticed him or his gallery. And why should they? Stonington isn’t exactly known as the epicenter for visual arts sales or a destination point for art dealers and buyers. Even if there has been a proliferation of small galleries on Main Street in the past few years, many are artist-run and -owned. Others cater to the lobster-and-lighthouse crowd. And gWatson was trying to be something altogether new.

Watson, daringly, describes his gallery as having more in common with urban galleries than with the neighboring ones in Stonington. And it’s true: The place is sparse, airy, clean in a way that makes you want to sip Chablis from a plastic cup while eavesdropping on the comments of a nearby critic.

It’s not just on the strength of the streamlined polish that Watson hopes to build his name, however. He’s banking that the impressiveness and refinement of the artworks themselves will bring art lovers, dealers and buyers to his gallery. Though he has been featuring artists from New England, he also shows works connected with several New York galleries. This summer, that means prints by Jim Dine and Michael Mazur, as well as other New York-represented artists with Maine connections such as Martha Diamond and Charles Hewitt, both of whom live in New York and summer in Maine.

“I was really very delighted with Ron’s gallery,” said Carole Pesner, president of Kraushaar Galleries, one of the oldest American art galleries in New York City. “There’s always a danger in coastal towns in Maine that they will be very commercial. The commercial galleries serve a function and I’m all for that. But Ron’s gallery is different. He isn’t selling the traditional sailboats and lobster boats. The space is beautiful and very professionally done. The works are quite abstract and there’s a lovely range, plus a variety of mediums. That’s exactly what we try to do here at Kraushaar.”

Pesner, whose gallery is on Fifth Avenue, has been in the art business for many years. In fact, in the 1960s, she spent her honeymoon on Deer Isle precisely because she had heard about the artist community there. She has been coming to Maine ever since. However, Watson, who grew up in Buffalo, N.Y., and moved to Stonington in the 1970s, arrived in Maine to open a boat-building company. Over the years, he developed an interest in art, which turns out to be not too different from his interest in boats, or in studying to be a minister, or running a school in Harlem, or teaching marine technology at Deer Isle-Stonington High School – all of which he has done.

Ron Watson, it turns out, is an entrepreneur, and the gWatson Gallery, which he opened four seasons ago as a summer venture, is his newest and most exciting project to date.

“Why did I open the gallery?” he reflected on a recent day as light from the nearby harbor streamed in the front windows. “This is an arts-infested community. Over the years, I went to galleries, met artists, began to get involved. Then it evolved into an interest. I wanted a really first-class space ideal for showing paintings.”

Watson admits, however, that his goals meant leaving the state and hunting throughout New England in search of fine paintings. It’s not that there isn’t great art in Maine, but Watson needed to find artists who didn’t have pre-existing commitments to dealers in Maine.

One of those artists was Jon Imber, whose work is on display at gWatson through July 31. For Imber, who lives in Somerville, Mass., and has summered in Stonington for the past 15 years, the Watson gallery is one of the best galleries for serious artists in the state and, in its short existence, already comparable to the prestigious New O’Farrell Gallery in Brunswick or Caldbeck Gallery in Rockland.

“Most of the summer galleries cater to summer tourists,” said Imber. “Those galleries are frequently very, very unchallenging. Ron has pretty consistently had high-quality paintings, and I believe is as good as any gallery in the country.”

As if that weren’t enough to make the gallery desirable to artists, Imber added that, as a businessman, Watson is “honest, decent, intelligent and uncorruptible” – qualities which are rare in the art world and invaluable to an artist trying to show his or her work.

While Imber and a handful of other local artists agree that there are other important galleries in the area – Leighton Gallery in Blue Hill, Turtle Gallery in Deer Isle, Clark House Gallery in Bangor, Center for Maine Contemporary Art (formerly Maine Coast Artists) in Rockport, among others – the space of gWatson has a more flowing layout that allows art to been seen at a distance without compromising intimacy. It helps, too, the artists say, that the rooms are not chopped up into several smaller viewing spaces.

“The gallery feels serious,” said Avy Claire, a Maine artist who had a solo exhibition at gWatson earlier this summer. “It has a nice tone and feels like it is about paintings. It wasn’t cluttered. It was spacious, and I really, really liked seeing my paintings that way. Last year, one of my paintings hung next to a Robert Rauschenberg. That was pretty nice.”

But the question of the gallery’s location remains the same as that first summer Watson spent on the bench by the ice cream stand. Can he reasonably expect to run a summer-only, off-the-beaten-path, upstairs, upscale gallery, where high-end pieces can cost up to $40,000? (The least expensive work in the gallery at the moment costs $250.)

Watson is reserved about discussing finances and prospects. But it’s fair, not to mention understated, to say that real estate prices in Stonington are lower than those on Fifth Avenue, and that the people who might be at an art opening at a gallery in Manhattan might be among the people who summer on Deer Isle. While everyone agrees that the gallery would be more visible on the street level, it’s clear that those looking for art will find their way up the side stairs. And many have already. The past two summers have not been what you might call lucrative, said Watson, but they have been encouraging.

“There are a lot of people from urban areas who come here,” said Watson, who greets people at the gallery seven days a week. “They build homes here and summer here. That’s always been the case in Maine. But Deer Isle-Stonington attracts more tourists than it did in the past. The other side of it is the high-quality work. I feel relatively new after four years, but the work does attract attention.”

Which means Watson spends less time in front of the ice cream stand and more time surrounded by art and visitors to his gallery.

gWatson Gallery is open 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday-Saturday, and 1-5 p.m. Sunday. It is located on Main Street in Stonington, just above the Grasshopper Shop. Visit the Web site at www.gwatsongallery.com.