For decades, three friends — Willoughby "Bill" Elliott (1943–2016), Severin "Sig" Haines (1946–2023), and Marc St. Pierre (1952–2019)— served as leading figures in the studios and classrooms of the Swain School of Design and the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Their collective influence not only established a model of artistic and educational excellence but also significantly shaped the South Coast's creative identity. This legacy continues through successive generations of artists.

Elliott, who taught at Mass Dartmouth from 1967 until his retirement as a Chancellor's Professor, urged his students to "allow others to step into the work — that's where the magic is." His landscapes translated perception into form and light, inviting viewers to enter the world as he saw it. A world that was sensitive and aware of constant change.

St. Pierre, who joined the Swain School of Design in 1979 and later UMass Dartmouth in 1988, layered maps, geometry, and gesture into tactile worlds of wax and paper. He built "a dialogue of random marks that combines the constructed with the unsystematic," teaching students to balance precision with the unexpected. He retired in 2017 after thirty-eight years of teaching.

Haines, a painter of striking natural insight, described himself as a formalist who "painted the landscape in service to painting." His color theory classes and his own work revealed how structure and emotion coexist, how the marsh and sky could be both real and abstract. He joined the Swain faculty in 1975, serving as Chair of Painting. After the merger, he taught at UMass Dartmouth, later serving as Graduate Director of the College of Visual & Performing Arts, and retired in 2011 after thirty-five years of teaching.

Each approached teaching as an extension of their studio practice, demanding discipline, curiosity, and a respect for process. Their students learned not only to create art, but also to think critically about it: to see relationships between space, tone, and texture as ways of understanding the world.