Archipelago Fine Arts, the gallery at the Island Institute, will exhibit sketches, studies and oils by James William “Bo” Bartlett III, a Georgia-born artist who paints on Matinicus. The 17 sketches and paintings in the show will be offered for sale.
“How did this son of the South find his way to the outer edge of Penobscot Bay?” asked art journalist Carl Little in a 2005 essay on Bartlett in Island Journal. Bartlett first came to Maine in the 1980s, Little wrote; “he fell in love” with Prout’s Neck, where Winslow Homer had painted many decades earlier, and subsequently he became acquainted with painter Andrew Wyeth and his wife, Betsy, through a filmmaking project. He worked on Allen Island, owned by the Wyeths, eventually traveling to Matinicus “to see just what was so forbidding” about the place.
Since that time Bartlett has become well known for his Matinicus-inspired work, much of it stemming from his time on Wheaton Island, which forms one side of Matinicus harbor. Learning that the island was for sale one summer, Bartlett and his wife bought it, and today they maintain a house there.
The Bartlett exhibit at Archipelago Fine Arts is scheduled to run from June 30 until Oct. 12, and complements an exhibit of Bartlett’s larger oil paintings opening at the Farnsworth Art Museum, also in Rockland, on the same day.