Philip Barter

Philip Barter (1939–2024) was a self-taught artist from Boothbay, Maine, who was living in California during the 1960s when 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. Hartley would serve as a kind of talisman, an artist to inspire but also to move beyond. Back in Boothbay Harbor, Barter met Frederick Rockwell, a painter and sculptor, who also encouraged Barter to keep painting.

By the 1970s, Barter and his second wife, Priscilla, had moved to downeast Maine, where they raised their seven children. Challenged to support his family as an artist, Barter took a ten-year hiatus from painting, working in all manner of traditional Maine jobs—he clammed, dug worms, was the sternman on a lobster boat, did carpentry, and dragged for mussels. In his spare time, Barter studied art history, and with Priscilla they made a life immersed in art for their large family.