Actress, artist, educator, cook, baker, and lifeguard Deb Arter holds one of her paintings in her Damariscotta home. Arter has been teaching adult education classes about art and cooking for the past 12 years. (Johnathan Riley photo)
Damariscotta resident Deb Arter is seemingly everywhere doing just about everything.
Depending on her jam-packed schedule she could be performing on stage in the latest Lincoln Theater production, teaching an adult education class on cooking, baking, or art in Brunswick, hosting the Airbnb she runs out of her home, or making paintings, collages, or printmaking.
The oldest of four siblings, Arter was born in Rochester, Minn. and grew up in Braham, Minn.
As a nine-year old, Arter became heavily involved with 4-H, a nonprofit organization with the mission of engaging youth and providing opportunities for them to learn through experience about civic engagement, healthy living, agriculture, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. That involvement, she said, laid a foundation for her future work as an adult education cook, artist, and teacher.
“We had to learn how to do demonstrations, I think that is directly linked to why I still travel all over the Midcoast teaching baking classes,” she said. “It’s just like I’m a doing a 4-H demonstration and everybody’s happy and they’re learning something.”
Through her time with the 4-H organization, she learned other skills that she carried throughout her life, such as sewing, parliamentary procedure, theater and how to raise money, and, perhaps most influentially, art.
In a new art direction being taken by 4-H, Arter interacted with artists from the Twin Cities in Minnesota in an art camp, which flipped a switch for her.
“I think I decided that I would study art in college,” she said. “I saw and met artists in the Twin Cities who were not in my little town. They all had three ducks flying over a marsh with two cat tails. That’s what everyone had.”
Arter attended Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa where she got a bachelor degree in art education.
During her summers in college she worked with the Girl Scouts of America in conservation camps where she counted deer scat to determine how many hunting licenses the state of Minnesota would give out each year.
In her junior year, when she was presented with the opportunity to go abroad and study at Salzburg Art College in Salzburg, Austria, she took it.
While she studied art from Germany, Italy, and learned about famous European painters, Arter lived with a family who helped her become fluent in German.
Arter also worked at a confirmation camp in Sweden where she also became fluent in Swedish.
“I was a good little parrot, I guess,” she said.
She also held jobs at the Waldorf School in Sweden and worked as a middle school art teacher at the American School in Stockholm.
After graduating from Iowa State University, Arter got a job at a school in Heidelberg, Germany as a registrar where she worked for five years. During that time she earned her master’s degree in international relations from Boston University.
For Arter, the experience abroad helped her explore life while exploring the world.
“My idea was that as soon as you settle down and have a couch, you can’t move around anymore,” Arter said. “You’re either going to have your freedom at the beginning of your life or the end and I chose the beginning.”
By 1986, Arter moved to Boston, Mass., to work with Boston University but the job didn’t pan out. Instead, she became a head-hunter for a citric acid company in Massachusetts.
With every job she’s held, there was another project to go along with it: selling etchings at craft shops, stitching clothing, or making alternations: all skills she first developed with 4-H.
“I always had a side hustle,” Arter said.
By 1993, Arter followed love to Christmas Cove in South Bristol with her husband at the time. Shortly after, they moved to Damariscotta where they had two kids.
While raising kids, Arter earned a Master of Fine Arts with a concentration in visual arts from Vermont College where the focus of much of her work was on family and the role of women at home.
“The house is never clean enough,” she said. “It was invisible labor that women do that is not compensated or not recognized.”
While not all of Arter’s work deals with family and the role of women at home, she said looking inward and analyzing what issues were at hand was a significant part of art graduate school.
“You dived deep,” she said. “Like what are you really about or what bothers you? I’m not saying all of my artwork deals with that, because I love gardens and sometimes I like to make stuff because I’m happy and I can’t not make it, but in grad school they want you to do the self examination.”
Arter said she wove a pot holder out of bacon that was displayed at the Center of Contemporary Art in Rockland, which was bought by an art dealer.
Her paintings have appeared all over New England. In Boston, she drew art for holiday cards and candles that were sold by The Jimmy Fund, a community-based fundraising event that benefits the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. According to Arter, she drew art for the cause for almost 10 years.
In Midcoast Maine, Arter’s work within art and cooking takes place at summer camps at Lincoln Academy in Newcastle and in adult education in Brunswick.
Arter also belongs to the Monotype Guild of New England as a printmaker, another craft she teaches in the Midcoast. In 2023, she received in award for a mixed media collage by the National Collage Society.
Arter started teaching painting and baking for adult education programs 12 years ago and it’s something she loves to be involved in.
“It was a way to have a lot of freedom of doing art, but still have the excitement of feeling like you’re on your own TV show,” she said, laughing.
As if her schedule wasn’t busy enough, for the past six years, Arter has also spent her time curating experiences for visitors to the area as an Airbnb host for the past six years at her home in Damariscotta. How to run an Airbnb and be a good host is another thing she teaches through adult education programs.
Arter said she teaches this in an online course, which she said is an ideal platform. Whereas she prefers to teach cooking, baking, and art in person.
“Making bread is much better in person, you smell the smell, you taste the taste,” she said.
In addition to being an artist, a cook, and Airbnb host, Arter was a lifeguard at the Boothbay Region YMCA from 2014 through 2019.
“I gravitate to people and that’s my eternal struggle,” she said. “The people in the cooking classes, the people in the art classes, the people in the pools while I was lifeguarding; it’s about people, but art is materials and it’s isolation, and balancing the two is always a struggle for me.”
Arter is the featured artist of the summer at Beal House, located at 72 Courtyard St. in Damariscotta, where her work will be on display throughout July and August.
For more information about Arter’s Airbnb, go to shorturl.at/dHtow.
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