{"id":612,"date":"2023-02-24T10:09:44","date_gmt":"2023-02-24T15:09:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/art-oresman-gallery\/?post_type=jetpack-portfolio&p=612"},"modified":"2025-07-16T10:06:59","modified_gmt":"2025-07-16T14:06:59","slug":"ellen-babcock","status":"publish","type":"jetpack-portfolio","link":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/art-oresman-gallery\/portfolio\/ellen-babcock\/","title":{"rendered":"“Tasseomania,” Ellen Babcock"},"content":{"rendered":"

On View: January 9 – March 23, 2023<\/p>\n

Like many East Coasters of her generation, Ellen Babcock drifted to the New Mexico desert in the 1980s with a hazy quest to seek spiritual meaning and solace, specifically to escape some of the constrictions of an Irish Catholic upbringing and to glean answers from an expansive landscape.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

She began making the paintings in Tasseomania<\/em> always starting with a loosely controlled gesture with watery paint, an event that births colors, shapes, and paper undulations that then become the context for coaxing out a pencil drawing that is often visible only upon close inspection. These pencil drawings are usually figurative in some way- eyes or hands, very tentatively and lightly drawn. She often thinks about pareidolia- the tendency to see faces in abstract form- as an example of the mind\u2019s inclination to identify with its own individual thoughts rather than more expansively with shared states of simply being.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Ellen Babcock ’79 is an artist, educator, and the founder of Friends of the Orphan Signs. Based in Albuquerque, NM, she draws inspiration from landscapes and from a panoply of materials, often scavenged or re-used. <\/span><\/i>Artist website<\/span><\/i><\/a><\/p>\n

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On View: January 9 – March 23, 2023 Like many East Coasters of her generation, Ellen Babcock drifted to the New Mexico desert in the 1980s with a hazy quest to seek spiritual meaning and solace, specifically to escape some of the constrictions of an Irish Catholic upbringing and to glean answers from an expansive […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6461,"featured_media":619,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"tags":[],"jetpack-portfolio-type":[14],"jetpack-portfolio-tag":[10],"class_list":["post-612","jetpack-portfolio","type-jetpack-portfolio","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","jetpack-portfolio-type-spring-2023-featured-artists","jetpack-portfolio-tag-archive"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/art-oresman-gallery\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/jetpack-portfolio\/612","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/art-oresman-gallery\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/jetpack-portfolio"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/art-oresman-gallery\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/jetpack-portfolio"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/art-oresman-gallery\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6461"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/art-oresman-gallery\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=612"}],"version-history":[{"count":26,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/art-oresman-gallery\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/jetpack-portfolio\/612\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1048,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/art-oresman-gallery\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/jetpack-portfolio\/612\/revisions\/1048"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/art-oresman-gallery\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/619"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/art-oresman-gallery\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=612"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/art-oresman-gallery\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=612"},{"taxonomy":"jetpack-portfolio-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/art-oresman-gallery\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/jetpack-portfolio-type?post=612"},{"taxonomy":"jetpack-portfolio-tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/art-oresman-gallery\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/jetpack-portfolio-tag?post=612"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}