Philip Barter, a prominent Maine artist known for his stylized colorful paintings of Maine landscapes, died this week at the age of 84.
Barter, who lived with his wife Priscilla in a home he built on South Bay Road in Franklin, died Tuesday of heart failure, according to his son, artist Matt Barter.
A prolific painter, Barter’s career stretched over 50 years and produced works that can be found in art museums in Portland, Rockland, at Bates College, and in many private collections. He used vibrant colors inspired by his travels around the world to depict Maine’s diverse scenery and seasonal changes, according to a 2017 story in the Ellsworth American.
“His colors were kind of wild,” said Carl Little, a Maine writer who has written several books about art, including “Forever Maine,” a 2017 book on Barter. “He had a way of extracting the essence of what he was looking at. He became one of Maine’s most beloved painters.”
Philip Barter was born in Boothbay Harbor in 1939 and began drawing at an early age. His grandfathers were tradesmen — one a boat builder, another a carpenter — and his uncles fished for a living, he said during a 2017 talk at Courthouse Gallery in Ellsworth.
He joined the Army as a young man and, after he got out, “bounced around on the beach in California for three or four years,” he said. It was during this time that he met the Spanish abstract expressionist Alfonso Sosa.
He traveled with and studied under Sosa for roughly two years, but he was inspired to move back to Maine to pursue art after he discovered the work of Marsden Hartley, an American modernist painter who was born and grew up in Lewiston.
Hartley traveled and worked extensively throughout North America and Europe, and painted many stylized landscapes in Maine. But it was a painting by Hartley of lobstermen on a pier in the Gouldsboro village of Corea that particularly resonated with Barter, the artist said.
“A light went on in my head” Barter told the gallery audience “I said ‘whoa. I’m going back to Maine and pick up where this guy left off.’ That’s been my goal right along.”
After returning to Maine, Barter studied for a few more years under Fritz Rockwell, a painter and sculptor who lived in Boothbay. He then moved Down East to Gouldsboro before settling in Franklin, and worked as a fisherman to pay the bills.
Barter and his wife had children from prior relationships and then had some together, raising nine in all, according to Matt Barter. In the early days of his artistic career, Philip Barter worked many jobs, mostly associated with fishing, to provide for his family and fund his creative output.
“All my childhood he was painting,” Matt Barter said. “He did pretty much anything he could to make ends meet.”
It took years for Philip Barter to gain traction and establish himself as a full-time artist. Many of his earlier paintings in Maine captured daily life on the Down East coast, inspired by colorful fishermen and other strong personalities he met.
Barter said he enjoyed chatting with them and listening to tales they told, often peppered with wry Maine humor, and he let their recounted experiences inform his narrative paintings of docks, fishing boats and villages.
“I got a lot of paintings from those stories,” Philip Barter told the Courthouse Gallery crowd. “These are my resources, these are the characters, these are the people that I love and love to be around.”
Barter’s work expanded to include carved and painted wall-mounted works and, by the late 1980s, his consistent output started getting broader attention, allowing him to focus on his art full time.
His work was shown at galleries in Ellsworth, Belfast, Boothbay, Portland, and elsewhere, and in 1992 Bates College gave him a major retrospective that garnered media attention. Through the state’s Percent for Art program, which sponsors art for publicly financed buildings, some of his pieces were put on permanent display at elementary schools in Deer Isle, Sedgwick and Sullivan.
Matt Barter said his father stayed productive as he faced health challenges in his later years. Maine Art Gallery in Wiscasset plans to show some of the father-son duo’s work this summer, and more shows are being planned for the lobby of The Grand Auditorium in Ellsworth and in the gallery of John Edwards Market across the street, the son said.
“He lived a beautiful life,” he said of his father. “He was surrounded by color and good food and people that he loved.”
