Joel Babb’s Maine
September 4 - 27
Opening Reception: Thurs., Sept. 4, 5-7pm
ARTIST STATEMENT
Lately it has become apparent to me that a place or a view speaks eloquently at one moment but later is reserved or ordinary or has no appeal. The Fall season in Maine is freighted with thoughts of oncoming winter, and the beauty of the woods is a spectacle of joy with a sense of parting. Summer is green with contentment and accomplishment, but Fall, for a few days, has a whole spectrum of light and color that affects me like a Handel chorus: the full range of harmony and counterpoint out loud. Add to this the joyful voice of a brook flowing through, and you have the perfection of nature. This is a “living moment,” and I hope these paintings capture some of those moments for you.
In a review by Emily Esfahani Smith in The New Criterion she quotes from the novel Gilead, by Marylin Robinson:
It has seemed to me sometimes as though the Lord breathes on this poor gray ember of Creation and it turns to radiance—for a moment or a year or the span of a life. And then it sinks back into itself again, and to look at it no one would know it had anything to do with fire, or light. That is what I said in the Pentecost sermon. I have reflected on that sermon, and there is some truth in it. But the Lord is more constant and far more extravagant than it seems to imply. Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration. You don’t have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see. Only, who could have the courage to see it?
(This is in a review of a book by Jeffrey Hart, The Living Moment: Modernism in a Broken World. In Gilead, the words are supposedly from a letter of an elderly pastor to his son.)
~ Joel Babb
Learn more about Joel Babb HERE.
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