Philip Mastrobattisto, a fisherman, wanderer, explorer, craftsman, and artist, died on April 18, 2024 at his friend Eric Lindholm’s Eastham home at age 68. The cause, according to his family, was colon cancer.
He was a man “born out of his time,” said his half-sister Nadine Rossignol.
The son of Daniel Mastrobattisto and Carol Elna Anderson, Phil was born on June 2, 1955 in Bristol, Conn., where he spent his first five years. His father was an eldest son who had been excluded from inheriting the family business — Mastrobattisto, Inc., a site development and concrete company founded by Phil’s grandfather — and who spent his time drinking and gambling, which led to his divorce from Carol in 1960.
Carol remarried and took Phil to live in New Britain, Conn., where her husband adopted him, and he grew up as Phil Rossignol. His ties to the Mastrobattistos remained strong, however, and anchored him to Eastham, where his grandparents had built a cottage on Kingsbury Beach. Phil returned to his original surname when he was in his forties.
As a boy, Phil found school challenging. He had difficulty reading, and his grades were not the best. He was inspired in middle school by his art teacher, however, whom Phil fondly recalled even in his last days.
Phil also loved music, and when Woodstock happened in 1969, he painted a mural on his bedroom wall depicting bands on stage and young people, some naked, dancing in the mud. “I still can see that mural,” Nadine said.
After attending New Britain High School for a couple of years, Phil dropped out. As an adult he was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome and dyslexia — diagnoses that were rarely made in schools in the 1960s. Nonetheless, “despite his challenges, he made his own way,” Nadine said.
At 17, Phil joined the Navy, serving in the Philippines at the tail end of the Vietnam War. Upon his discharge he returned to Connecticut and began a life of wandering, exploration, isolation, and creativity.
Phil did not get a driver’s license until his late 40s; he “hitchhiked everywhere,” Nadine said. He found his way back to the Cape and worked on fishing boats, including the Gerda Riva, the Little Infant, and the Southern Cross out of Provincetown and boats out of New Bedford and Fairhaven.
“I know he worked on a scallop boat and fished for cod,” Nadine said, “because he would supply us with fish.”
He also crewed boats out of Alaska, North Carolina, and New York and fished the Grand Banks off the coast of Newfoundland for swordfish.
Like many fishermen, Phil enjoyed his drink, but not all who drank near him. “He had a reputation for being rowdy, and a good number of bars banned him,” Nadine said. His friends affectionally referred to him as “Crazy Phil” — as did a few of his not-friends.
Phil loved solitude and walked the Appalachian Trail twice. According to Eric Lindholm, he once hitchhiked from Alaska to Florida and then back to the Cape.
In Alaska, Phil fished for scallops, crabs, halibut, and salmon out of Kodiak Island and Dutch Harbor, a remote outpost in the Aleutian Islands. He was often the ship’s cook, including on the Barbara Lee during the Exxon Valdez oil spill cleanup in 1989. But Phil sought a deeper solitude.
“He could live off the grid,” his half-sister Pam Donovan said. At one point he was out of touch with his family for three years. He spent several months on Cora and Milt Holmes’s Chernofski sheep ranch in an even more remote part of the Aleutians than Dutch Harbor, until he was picked up by a crabbing boat and took work delivering supplies by freighter to native villages.
Throughout his peripatetic life, Phil was a committed, self-taught artist, who used charcoal, pastels, and oils on composite board and thin sheets of wood. He painted ships, buildings, and landscapes, “no scenes with people in them,” Nadine said, “except for the mural he did for a now-closed antique shop in Buzzards Bay.”
“He was a real starving artist,” said Eric, who took Phil on a trip to Boston once to see gallery owners, none of whom “would give him a chance.”
Phil’s work was eventually seen, though. In 1999 his work was in a show called “Folk Art New England” at Northwestern Connecticut Community Technical College, and his work was also exhibited at the Snow Library in Orleans. His painting of a red diner was reproduced on sets of coasters, and another was printed on note cards at the Gateway Gallery & Arts Store in Brookline.
“Being known as an artist was most important to him,” Nadine said. “But when his work was part of a show, as it was once in Norwich, Conn. for a show on ‘outsider art,’ he would not go to the opening.”
Phil was also a skilled woodworker and craftsman whose many projects included cabinets, bookcases, storage trunks, gazebos, and wood filigree for Victorian restoration projects. When his sister Pam got married, Phil built her a large entertainment center as a wedding gift. He also built elaborate model boats and planes.
Toward the end of his life, Phil lived for a time at the Old Soldiers’ Home in Chelsea and later in Veterans Administration housing in Hyannis. When his cancer progressed, Eric offered a room in his home so Phil could spend his final six weeks in Eastham, where each morning he would rise early to walk in the woods and commune with the birds.
Although he had few friends, he was close to Eric Lindholm and former frame shop owner Gordon Anderson, with whom he worked in the early 2000s. Through all his travels, he never lost touch with his sisters. “He knew how to love,” Pam said.
Phil is survived by three half-sisters: Darcie Mastrobattisto of Florida, Pam Rossignol Donovan of Connecticut, and Nadine Rossignol of Massachusetts.
Donations in Phil’s honor may be made to VNA Hospice, 434 Route 134, Suite G1, South Dennis 02660.
