‘I love hearing what people see in my paintings’
Rappahannock’s Fall Art Tour is returning next weekend. Among the 40+ participants are 7 new artists. We profiled three last week; here’s a look at the remaining four.
Babcock’s art turns personal into universal
Jennifer Babcock’s oil paintings reflect connections to family, to the past, and to the challenges of parenting nine distinctly individual children. “The poetry of day-to-day life,” she says. Her work exploring ties that bind, turns the personal into the universal and the exotic into the familiar.
Babcock’s parents were Peace Corps workers in Ethiopia and her childhood home in Alexandria echoed with Amharic as Ethiopian expats moved from being strangers to friends.
When her parents found a farm near Flint Hill, Babcock didn’t feel the attraction. Art was another matter. From the start, it was magical. “The only thing I wanted to study was art. That’s all I wanted to do.” But she put art aside to raise five children, bringing out her supplies only a few times a year for paintings to barter for flute, ballet and piano lessons.
Her father’s fascination with chairs, from heirlooms to roadside throwaways, “got me back into painting.” When he died, she worked through her grief with Chairs, portraits of a dozen or so organic, worn, wellloved and well used chairs “that awaken memories of the viewer’s own family artifacts.”
A trip to Ethiopia to explore the world of her father’s stunning black-and-white photographs led her to subterranean Lalibela. Her Passageways series resulted and so did repeat trips to adopt four Ethiopian children.
Before her father died, Babcock settled in at the family farm to be with him and then to help her mother. “I walked on trails he built through the woods. It was a healing time of beauty and peace.” Finally, feeling the magic of Rappahannock, she and her husband bought the farm where she continues to follow her central philosophy, “Art needs to tell a story.”
Light is everything for Carrington
Two muses tug at Tim Carrington. At the University of Virginia, he was an English major immersed in art history and studio art and studied for a year in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico’s vibrant arts center. He spent one career as a writer, first an economic journalist reporting for the Wall Street Journal, then a communications officer focusing on Africa for the World Bank. When he retired and moved to Rappahannock 40 years later, he began painting again, inspired by the beauty of the countryside.
Carrington works in oils, creating landscapes that merge what he sees with what he remembers, blending the familiar with the exotic. Groupings of people are captured moments from stories left for the viewer to finish; they suggest an unexplained drama and give hints to multiple narratives. He shifts from monochromatic to bold mixes of color and from representational to impressionistic, depending 0n the mood and the message he’s conveying. “I see the light first and foremost. Colors are what they are as a result of light. Light is everything.”
There are magical transformations — works that began as one thing and end up something else entirely. Like Flight into Egypt. Paint went to canvas first in 1972 as a still life in a rosy sunset. Turned upside down and reimagined with blocks of color, new shapes and flashes of light, it’s now an urban tenement, the bold and bright splotches suggesting hopefulness and happiness amidst poverty. “Executed in Mexico and Virginia, spanning 45 years,” Carrington concluded.
Art connects Felix and granddaughter
Painting was a side line for Carol Felix, whose bachelor of fine arts degree was the basis for a business in graphic design. She and her husband settled in Rappahannock years after wandering back roads following a day’s trek in the park. They drew a circle on their map near Ben Venue to designate where they would return some day. “It’s just so beautiful here. It calls to artists.”
They are still in real estate, but now Felix also maintains two acres of alpine garden and spends most of her day painting. Her studio is an extension of a Viewtown farmhouse dating to the 1860s. Light streams through two-story windows bringing the outdoors in, and the play of angling sunshine and rolling clouds changes the canvas constantly. In landscape and still life, she captures the moment when golden light reflects, objects glow and dark shadows drape and spread.
Her granddaughter Madeline Ponticelli is taking a year off from Pratt Art Institute for a residency with Felix. She, too, is exhibiting in The Art Room, as the studio is dubbed. While Felix’s work is traditional and rich with luminosity and depth, Madeline’s is whimsical in subjects and titles. She paints boldly in bright colors, and her flat shapes, strong lines and dramatic contrasts hint at art deco and cubism. She is experimenting with more monochromatic compositions and heavier textures, and just finished a series reinterpreting the Old Masters’ style.
“I’m happy to have Madeline here,” concluded Felix “and see the art tour through her eyes.”
ing. Nearly a quarter of respondents reported rushing their hike to “beat the crowd.” And nearly 1 in 10 of hikers ventured off the beaten path to bypass crowds, potentially harming the environment, according to the study.
Crowding is a particularly acute issue along a stretch of the trail dubbed “the chute” where the path constricts and forces hikers to maneuver atop boulders, thus slowing a hike’s pace and creating tight bottlenecks. Some hikers reported waiting more than an hour to pass through the chute, according to Kenney.
Holidays and weekends are the highest traffic days on the mountain where more than half of survey respondents reported taking some sort of action to avoid crowding, while a majority of hikers on weekdays took no action.
A group of young hikers, who were interviewed near the height of the autumn “leaf season” on a Friday afternoon (Oct. 22) by Rappahannock News as they reached the Nethers base of Old Rag from the summit, said it wasn’t too crowded and that they didn’t mind when the trail briefly became congested.
“There was something kind of fun about slowing your roll and watching other people navigate it,” said Elizabeth Markey, of Richmond, who hiked with a group of three friends.
Dan Elliot, of Washington, D.C., another member of the party who has climbed the mountain on busier days in the past, said, “You’re kind of waiting in line a little bit, but you don’t mind because you’re sort of talking [and] you’re engaging with people while you’re waiting — there’s a communal feel to it … the idea of a ticketing system kind of strikes me as a little bit off.”
Another duo on Friday, who visited from Maryland, arrived at Old Rag’s base from the summit, saying they experienced a single bottleneck in a particularly tight location along the loop trail that held them up for no more than 10 minutes. But they weren't bothered by it. “You had to really take your time going through that area,” Paula Kuruc said, noting the rough terrain. The duo supports a ticking system to promote safety by lessening crowing in compact areas of the trail that tend to require more careful maneuvering.