Farnsworth’s Joel Babb exhibit yields new perspectives with each viewing | Column
Farnsworth Art Museum Unveils “Shifting Visions: Joel Babb’s Painted Universe”
The Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland is currently hosting a survey of Maine‑born painter Joel Babb. The show, titled Shifting Visions: Joel Babb’s Painted Universe, runs through January 31 2027 and displays a dozen works that chart the artist’s career from the early 1990s to the present.
Babb, who has spent decades working in oil on linen, is best known for his highly detailed landscapes and cityscapes that blend realism with a painterly touch. The exhibition gathers several of his most celebrated pieces, including Church and State (2018), Copley Plunge (1990), Eggemoggin Reach (2002), A Sunlit Brook, Wight Brook, Grafton Notch (2022), and The Bath Iron Works (1994). The museum’s collection also holds Babb’s 2013 painting Bernd Heinrich’s Brook in Autumn.
Babb’s oeuvre centers on three major subjects: sweeping aerial views of Boston, scenes of Maine’s forests and coastlines, and a handful of works set in Rome and hospital rooms. His Boston compositions, such as Church and State, showcase the city’s Charles River and landmarks like the Massachusetts State House and Park Street Church, arranged in a way that invites viewers to see the city from a unique perspective. The artist’s Maine landscapes—Eggemoggin Reach and A Sunlit Brook—capture the natural light filtering through trees and the motion of water in a way that departs from strict realism to convey a sense of fluidity.
In a review for the Press Herald, local writer Jorge S. Arango praised Babb’s technical mastery and his handling of light. “I have always preferred the forest scenes to the Boston panoramas,” Arango wrote. He added that Babb’s cityscapes “bring a poignancy to all the hard surfaces of the city” through “the phenomenon of light shifting rapidly as clouds scurry by.” Arango noted the artist’s use of observation to render “the specificity of the reflections in the glass towers, which are as photographically rendered as in a Richard Estes painting.”
Arango also highlighted Babb’s ability to convey sensation and emotion beyond surface detail. He described Copley Plunge as “a vertiginous overhead shot that makes our heads spin because of the way it conveys the phenomenon of gravity,” and said that Babb “translates the phenomenon of light… to give the viewer a rush of danger.” In discussing Babb’s Maine scenes, Arango said that while “the stratification of rocks, that golden Barbizon light and the sliminess of seaweed” are present, “pictorial verisimilitude is almost beside the point.” The artist’s loose depiction of water in A Sunlit Brook—“a collection of hundreds of splotches of color” rather than “obsessively rendered details”—was described as a deliberate choice to capture “the magical mutability of water’s natural state.”
The exhibition is open seven days a week, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. (after December 31, the museum is open Wednesday through Monday). It will close on Tuesdays. Visitors can find the show at 16 Museum St., Rockland, Maine. For more information, call 207‑596‑6457 or visit the Farnsworth Art Museum’s website.
