THE ART OF SEEING

Artist Joel Babb's paintings depict vast and intimate perspectives of nature and architecture.

- JOHN O'HERN

Joel Babb, chronicler of the complex architecture of Boston and the natural intricacies of the Maine woods and the sea, began his career as an abstract expressionist. “I had no patience for older art then,” he says. “Over time I got reversed. I became much more interested in earlier art.” He was an avid student of art history at Princeton, however, and was impressed by his seminar with Wen Fong, who illustrated the way Chinese artists revered and emulated the past.

After Princeton, he went to Rome and Florence. He had studied perspective in art history but encountered it in real life in the art and architecture there. “Once you have seen the Sistine Chapel and the Raphaels of the Stanza,” he explains, “your scale is set to a different starting point.” He saw the built realization of Alberti’s and Brunelleschi’s study of the ancient architecture of Rome.

“It felt as if someone handed me a violin and said ‘Play!’ I didn’t know how to play. I needed to start over,” he says. Babb decided to dedicate himself to painting rather than art history and returned to the U.S. to pursue an MFA at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. The museum, in addition to its treasures of Western art, has a fine collection of Chinese art. In addition to the perspective in Renaissance and classical painting, he was intrigued by the Asian use of isometric perspective, “a whole different way of constructing space. I began studying perception, how the mind apprehends what it sees—what is the process of seeing.”