Marsha Mills was not an aviation artist, but as the exclusive artist for the First Flight Centennial Foundation, she’s quickly becoming one. What caught the foundation’s attention was her 1987 watercolor rendering of the Wright Brothers National Monument on top of the Big Hill at Kill Devil Hills, N.C., the place where Orville and Wilbur chose to experiment with their manned and unmanned gliders and eventually made the first manned flight in a powered aircraft on Dec. 17, 1903.
A native of North Carolina, Mills was asked by the National Academy of Arts to submit her painting, the Wright Monument, in a 1998 national contest. The painting ended up being chosen as one of the top 20 out of 2,300 entries. After a short tour around the country, it was brought to Washington, D.C., where it hung in the Capitol Building office of North Carolina House Rep. Martin Lancaster for one year.
