NEW YORK – When John Wulp was in third grade in New Rochelle, N.Y., his art teacher asked the students to bring an object to paint in class. He showed up with a small branch of a flowering tree and began rendering its shape in watercolor. Wulp, who is 74 and lives on Vinalhaven, recounts the experience in “John Wulp,” a new, elegantly produced art book that chronicles his life and work as an artist.

“I was filled with excitement,” he writes in the first pages of the book’s autobiographical section. “I thought the top of my head would come off. … I found a means of expression and a theme that has lasted my entire life. I am still painting that branch.”

While Wulp is best known in Maine as a celebrated director of community and school theater productions on North Haven, he won national fame as a set designer and producer in New York City. He has won an Obie, a Tony, a Drama Desk Award, an Outer Critics Circle Award, a Los Angeles Drama Critics Award and was founder of Playwrights Horizons Studio School in New York. In 1985, when work in New York was waning, Wulp moved to Maine because he was inspired by the paintings of Fairfield Porter and wanted to devote his time to painting. Since then, his life on North Haven and Vinalhaven has engaged him both as a theater artist and painter.

Last week Wulp returned to New York for the opening of a show of his acrylic and watercolor paintings at Beadleston Gallery on Fifth Avenue and to do a reading from the book, which is put out by CommonPlace Publishing, at the Lenox Hill Bookstore. A second exhibition of his work will take place at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland in May.

“This is my 75th year to Heaven,” said Wulp, revealing his literary side by paraphrasing the poet Dylan Thomas. Wulp, who is a dedicated reader and writer, curated and mounted the show at the gallery owned by his friend William Beadleston. “I decided if I were going to have a show, it would be in my 75th year.”

The exhibition features his work as a portraitist but also as a painter deeply connected to nature, especially to his surroundings in Maine, where all but two of the paintings were made during the last 10 years. His style can be described as hyper-real with heightened colors and explicit shadows.

The book collects much of Wulp’s oeuvre – paintings, photographs and set designs – in glossy reproductions, and the history behind many of those works is detailed in the autobiography, which is, in turns, tragic and funny. It also recounts Wulp’s time on the islands in Maine, his controversial status as a tenacious director and his numerous successes with productions, including the original musical “Islands,” a community theater piece that was performed on Broadway shortly after the events of Sept. 11 and will be the subject of the documentary “On This Island” on Maine Public Broadcasting on Feb. 18.