Southern Appeal

At the end of July, I was standing with artist Bo Bartlett and his wife, painter Betsy Eby, on the western side of Wheaton Island, a twenty-acre lozenge of granite and spruce about twenty-two miles off the coast of Maine. We were on the shore, surrounded by sea kelp and tall loaves of rock, looking for good stones to skip. Bartlett, 65, is tan and boyish; he speaks softly, with a sort of preacherly calm, but is quite playful and energetic. In addition to painting, he runs a weekly radio show and