The Bill and Joan Alfond Gallery
Located just through the lobby of the theatre and before the seats, the Waldo Theatre's gallery is home to fine art by local artists and craftspeople. Whether you're seeing a show or just walking by, stop in to see what's new at the gallery.
Irvine & the Barters
August 11 – September 20
This exhibition brings together two generations of Maine’s coastal painting tradition: William Irvine, Philip Barter, and Matt Barter. All three were the subjects of documentaries by Brunswick-based filmmakers David Jester and Leigh Doran of Whisky Wolf Media, screened together at The Waldo as part of the 4th Annual Maine Artist Film Series. In the Blood (2020) follows Philip and Matt Barter, father and son, as they capture the working life and landscapes of Downeast Maine, a tender portrait of an artistic bond and a shared way of seeing the coast they call home. A Life Behind the Canvas (2024) is a documentary on the career of William Irvine, filmed at his waterfront home and studio in Brooklin and tracing a career that now spans more than seventy years. Together, their work offers three distinct visions of a single, enduring place.
Irvine & the Barters will be on display in the Bill and Joan Alfond Gallery from August 11 through September 20, with viewing available during Artwalk Waldoboro on Friday, August 28 from 4–7pm, during performances at The Waldo, or by appointment.
William Irvine, Table with Lobster and Bait Bag, 2023, oil on canvas 36 x 36 in.
William Irvine
William Irvine (b. 1931) has established himself over the past sixty-plus years as a Maine and American master, known for his seascapes, as well as his enchanting figurative paintings and still lifes.
Irvine was born in Troon, a small coastal village in Scotland. He was introduced to modern art in high school, when he and best friend William Crozier were invited by the family to view the art collection of whiskey magnate Johnnie Walker. After graduating from the Glasgow School of Art and serving in the Scottish army, Irvine came of age in London, where he and Crozier were abstract painters living in Soho and part of a lively avant-garde art scene.
In 1968, Irvine moved to downeast Maine, and was immediately drawn to the fishing villages of Corea and Jonesport, whose tidy houses reminded him of the white farms dotting the green hills of Scotland. Here, harbor, boats, islands, and the sea and sky inspired bold work fueled by two driving forces: abstraction and representation.
“No one on the planet does anything like Irvine does. This uniqueness of vision, and the persistence and prolific nature of its development are astonishing. All that is needed is exposure to a larger world, at which point he will come to be viewed, by those who do not know him now, as a modern master.”
— Jorge S. Arango
Philip Barter, Millbridge, 2011, acrylic on board, 24 x 30 in.
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 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.
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, the Portland Museum of Art, and Bates 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 on the CBS Sunday Morning program hosted by Charles Kuralt.
Barter spent a half-century painting narratives based on Maine’s fiercely independent people and the landscape of his home state, becoming the “painter laureate” of the region.
Matt Barter, King Tide, 2024, oil on board, 40 x 28 in.
Matt Barter
Matt Barter lives in Brunswick, Maine with his wife, Rebekah, and their two boys. Together they updated a carriage house on their property using reclaimed barn boards and turned it into a studio and gallery. Upstairs, Matt paints and sculpts; downstairs is where he exhibits new work.
As a teenager, Matt studied with his father, Philip, working in his studio in Sullivan, Maine, where he learned the mechanics of oil painting. He also worked with his father at a young age on various commercial fishing boats, lobstering, mussel harvesting, and more, experience that shaped his style and his focus on the working harbors of Maine.