PHILIP BARTER (1939–2024)
Andrew’s Boatyard
1987
oil on canvas, 24 x 30 inches
from a private estate
$9000 June 12 – July 7, 2023
Philip Barter from a Private Estate
Philip Barter (b.1939) painted these lively oils in the 1980s and 1990s at the pinnacle of his illustrious career.
Barter is a self-taught artist, who was born and raised in Boothbay Harbor, Maine. Like many young people, he went to California during the 1960s where he met Alfonso Sosa, an abstract expressionist painter. Sosa took Barter under his wing and added a “charge of light and color” to Barter’s aesthetic vision that in influenced his work for the next fifty years.
While living out west, Barter encountered the work of Marsden Hartley and experienced an aesthetic epiphany. He felt an immediate connection with the Lewiston-born painter.
Back in Maine, Barter was encouraged to keep painting. By the 1970s, he was challenged to support his family of nine as an artist. Barter took a ten-year hiatus from painting, working in all manner of traditional Maine jobs—clamming, worm digging, lobstering and dragging for mussels. In his spare time, Barter studied art history.
By the time Barter returned to painting full-time, he was receiving critical acclaim for his work. Bates College Museum of Art mounted a retrospective of Barter’s work in 1992. The Farnsworth Museum of Art, the Portland Museum of Art, and the Bates College Museum of Art acquired his work. In 1995, Barter was the subject of a feature profile in Down East magazine, and Tim Sample highlighted Barter’s life in art in one of his “Postcards from Maine” segments, which aired on the CBS Sunday Morning program hosted by Charles Kuralt.
