With A Master On The Mountain

Babb's "Copley Plunge" Boston Museum of Fine Art

When I contacted Seth Lipsky, a summer friend from New York City who has a place in Waterford, Maine, he suggested we have an early breakfast in Bethel. He had plans to meet another friend there, then go up Mount Washington to paint. As we finished eating, in walked none other than Joel Babb of Sumner, Maine, an accomplished painter of Roman and Boston cityscapes, interior and coastal Maine scenes, as well as other subjects. I was thrilled to meet him because I’ve been admiring his work ever since the Portland Press Herald did a big spread on him exactly a year ago. I saw his exhibition at Portland’s Greenhut Gallery this summer and was sorry to miss his talk there a month ago.

Babb's “Bernd Heinrich’s Brook” 40 by 52 inches

Seth is the founder and editor of the New York Sun, an independent conservative daily paper in New York City that published in hard copy for several years and continues to exist online. Seth has time to paint now and met Joel in that pursuit. I had told him of my recent photographic ventures which led to my interest in Babb because I had shot some of the scenes he painted in Rome and in Maine. I was doubly thrilled when both invited me to accompany them on their artistic expedition. I wasn’t dressed for a day on “the rock pile,” as locals refer to Mount Washington, but Seth said he had an extra slicker in his car so off we went. I left a voice mail for my wife as we drove.

Seth and Joel on the rock pile

Each artist had already started two canvases — one from around the 4000-foot mark and another from 6000, both looking north toward Mount Adams. Joel often works from photographs, but these were plein air style (in the open air). They let me watch, take pictures, and ask questions as they discussed how to mix various colored paints to match the gray stone piles and dark green fir trees on the slopes, as well as the blue sky and white clouds beyond. Several tourists stopped to watch them work. The ever-gregarious Seth conversed with them, describing Joel as the master and himself as acolyte. Babb certainly is that. It’s hard to tell his work is a painting and not a photograph. It’s that good.

It was a lovely day, cold at first and a bit breezy, but the sun was strong and it soon warmed enough that I only needed a light fleece to stay comfortable. Only once before had I been on the Mount Washington Auto Road and I had vowed never to drive it again. Steep, narrow, winding roads with near-vertical drop-offs give me the willies, as they did in the west of Ireland earlier this year. Seth drove, however, and it didn’t seem to bother him. He has a season pass and goes up there a lot. I sat in the back and sometimes had to close my eyes. 

The artists discuss colors

Knowing nothing about oil painting, I was continually impressed by their strenuous efforts to render the scenes before them just as they existed. They scrutinized each facet of the view much more closely than I ever do with my camera and conditions changed by the hour as the sun moved. Joel pointed to a patch of snow on one of the canvases he had begun back in July. He wasn’t satisfied with his shades of green on the fir groves and worked to mix more colors to strive for a closer match. I felt privileged that they both answered my questions and I tried not to be a pest.

His paintings at Greenhut Galleries in July were priced in five figures, while I only charge $300 for one of my photos. He asked how my sales were going and I told him selling my stuff was a new endeavor and I only photographed only things that interest me -- and I resisted requests to do otherwise. At that he raised his white eyebrows, saying, “You turned down commissions? You know, Leonardo said once: ‘Give them a few virgins. Then paint what you want.’” Babb had studied Da Vinci extensively during his year in Rome. Like him, he attended dissections at BU Medical School to understand musculature — although Da Vinci had done the dissections himself.

Da Vinci anatomy drawing

Seth and Joel both immersed themselves in their work. For Joel, though, it’s total immersion and has been for decades. He majored in art history at Princeton, but decided to be an artist instead of an historian. He said only two others in his class had done so. At about three in the afternoon, I helped them carry their equipment back to Seth’s minivan and we drove back down the rock pile. Again I closed my eyes at precarious points but Seth remained undaunted.

As we each walked to our vehicles at the bottom, Joel invited me to see his studio in Sumner. I intend to take him up on that sometime this fall.

I Love Maps

Maine has the second largest collection of globes in the country housed at the Osher Map Library on the campus of the University of Southern Maine in Portland. Only the Library of Congress has more. The Osher Library also contains more than 400,000 maps of all kinds and over 7000 have been digitized according to the Library’s web site.

Prior to computers, maps were the best way to organize many kinds of knowledge. As a teacher my classroom was full of them. Seven were pull-downs and I still miss being able to walk over and pull one down like a shade to study it when something happens in a remote part of the world. As things change politically, maps have to depict new national boundaries, especially after wars, but the old maps will always be valuable as historical references.

Topographic maps don’t change nearly as fast — only after a lot of volcanic and tectonic activity. Depending on how extensive the eruption in Hawaii becomes, local maps may need modification. Last month I toured Civita di Bagnoregio — a town perched on the head of a pin which is all that remains of once-thriving Italian town founded by Etruscans over 2500 years ago. In the 17th century it had 2500 people but now only ten live there year-round. Most of the town has fallen away due to earthquake activity and erosion and what remains is a small butte with medieval buildings atop and accessed by a long pedestrian bridge.

Civita di Bagnoregio last month

Maps depict what we know and older ones show what we didn’t know. The earliest printed map of what is now the state of Maine was done in 1793, decades after most towns around where I live in western Maine were established and it was part of Massachusetts. Mapmaker Osgood Carleton didn’t know much about interior Maine, nor the course of the St Croix River which became part of the boundary between the USA and Canada in 1842. There were few surveys and he had to rely on anecdotal data.

Subsequent Carleton maps indicate that Moosehead Lake still had not been surveyed by 1795 and he etched its eastern boundary as a vague dotted line. Nonetheless, there’s a lot of information on these early maps. When I visited the Osher Library with one of its benefactors eight years ago, I witnessed some of its efforts to digitize its extensive collection, a tedious process employing a 60-megapixel camera. Pulling up one of their thousands of digitized maps now, we can zoom in very close without losing resolution.

Astounded by the camera’s capabilities back then, I’ve since purchased a Nikon D850 which was introduced only last fall with 45 megapixels. I had to wait over a month to get it because it’s so popular all around the world. Mapping renders relatively small pictures of very large things, like the entire earth’s surface for one example. By contrast, my new camera enables me to shoot a faraway image with my zoom lens at its strongest, then put the image on my computer and zoom in further to see details I never would have been able to view with my former equipment, or with my naked eye.

Researching for this article, I came across a 1902, birds-eye view of Mount Washington on the Osher web site. If you’re reading this in a newspaper, go here: http://oshermaps.org/exhibitions/map-commentaries/the-eye-of-mt-washington). First published in a pamphlet, it was a piece of artwork as well as a guide, offering then-unique perspectives on our environs in the north country. People couldn’t fly over the mountain back then, but they could pull out their pamphlet and use a magnifying glass to see details only available to eagles.

Before Saco Valley Printing in Fryeburg went out of business, I purchased sets of old county maps of Maine and New Hampshire from both 1858 and 1880 as well as larger maps of Oxford County towns around where I live. They’re slices of history showing old roads and farms no longer in existence —  abandoned and reclaimed by wilderness. Now only stone walls and cellar holes remain, and occasionally dead hulks of what had been massive sugar maples behind which houses and barns once stood.

While I have GPS devices for my vehicles, I also have hard-copy maps in each. When navigating in unfamiliar places there’s nothing like those 21st century GPS devices to get where I’m going, but if I’m not in a hurry, I like to have a real map in my hands to get perspective on where I've ended up. A real map enables me to see what’s over the next hill because I might decide to explore it.