Joe Barrett (1928-2018) was a postwar California painter who studied under Rico Lebrun at the Jepson Art Institute. Working across nearly seventy years, from the late 1940s through 2018, he created hundreds of paintings and drawings in Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, and Ventura. After choosing to work privately outside the commercial art world in the mid-1970s, most of his work remained unseen during his lifetime. His son is now documenting and sharing the archive, making these works available to collectors and institutions for the first time.