| Phil Barter |
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| excerpt from "Maine According to Philip Barter" |
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| Philip Barter's career as an artist can best be described by one word - remarkable. A self taught artist, with no formal or academic art training, Barter spent many years rigorously developing his art skills. By the 1980s he had emerged as one of Maine's leading regionalist painters, and was soon being touted as Maine's quintessential painter. |
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| A prolific artist, his paintings alone are nearing two thousand in number, and are scattered throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe in both individual and corporate collections. |
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| Born in 1939 in Boothbay Harbor, Maine, Barter's interest in art - primarily drawing - asserted itself early on and was self - motivated. By his mid -teens, drawing had become a daily occupation and, as he would say later, a redeeming outlet for his "growing pains." |
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| A brief stay in California in the early Sixties proved critical to his resolve to become a painter. Two powerful experiences share responsibility for this. The first was Alphonso Souza, a Spanish Expressionist painter with whom he "studied" infomally over a three year period. The other experience, and of far greater import, was his discovery of the paintings of Marsden Hartley (1877-1943), Maine's first native painter to achieve international recognition during his lifetime, and one of this century's first American advocates of Modernism. |
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| Then, in 1988, his reputation as a leading regionalist folk-art painter and interpreter of Maine's Down East experience(captured primarily in his narrative paintings) had reached officials at Massachusetts' DeCordova Museum, who promptly included six of his narratives in their traveling exhibition "Stories to Tell: The Narrative Impulse in Contemporary New England Folk art." It was Philip Barter's first important exposure in a publication devoted exclusively to art and artists. |
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| But more recognition was on the way. |
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| In 1992 Bates College, in Lewiston, honored him with his first retrospective for his quarter century contribution to Maine art. |
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| More info on Phil and Matt Barter |
| Mor info on Phil's current shows |