Scene Magazine | Winter 2021
It was Christmas 1969, and Margaret Babbitt was 12 years old when her father Ted gifted her with a set of 12 markers – all different shades of gray.
Looking back, Babbitt remembers how her dad wanted her to grow as an artist.
"He wanted me to learn how to see differently, to read tonal values instead of the colors themselves," she said.
A few years later: "Nothing terrified my parents more than me being a self-employed artist."
They needn't have worried. Today, Babbitt is an accomplished, well-regarded painter, but one with a day job. She serves St. Ambrose as Director of Annual Giving in the Advancement Office.
How do you connect painting with raising money for the SAU Annual Fund?
"Painting and fundraising are both puzzles," Babbitt said. "With a painting, I can picture the end product and think about the steps to achieve that. With annual giving, you have to figure out how to get to the end point. So, I ask myself, 'How can I be creative with my words and understand what's important to our donors to connect to the University and make a gift that is meaningful to them?'"
The Annual Fund provides programmatic and scholarship funds to students through donations from alumni, faculty and staff, parents and friends of the University.
Margaret Babbitt
Creating crisp, light-filled images of shoreline cottages, with slants of sunlight beaming through the porch rails and stately pillars, these are all throwbacks to Babbitt's childhood in New England.
When did you first start painting?
"I started out doing silkscreen prints shortly after college, and I did that for 20 years or so," Babbitt said. "I liked the crisp lines, and pushing the limits of blocks of color."
Creating silkscreen (or serigraph) prints – an arduous process involving precise cutting of stencils and printing multiple layers of ink – was Babbitt's first professional endeavor and a nod to her architect dad.
"I liked the contrast of architectural elements against the coastal marsh or landscape," said Babbitt. "My father spent many hours at our kitchen counter teaching me about vanishing points and architectural perspective."
Creating crisp, light-filled images of shoreline cottages, with slants of sunlight beaming through the porch rails and stately pillars, these are all throwbacks to Babbitt's childhood in New England.
What medium do you like to paint with right now?
Babbitt now creates marsh images with acrylic paints - a water-based, opaque medium that allows her to create vivid landscapes using a paint layering technique called "scumbling."
"I'm just beginning to figure it out," Babbitt says humbly, like a true artist. "It's a lot of drybrush layering - if you mess up you just keep layering with new colors. Not unlike the annual fund - you just keep trying to say it, in a way that someone else will see it the same way."
Margaret's artwork is featured in several galleries as well as public and private collections in the U.S., Europe, and Japan. Most recently, Babbitt's 18x24 piece "Coming and Going" was accepted to the prestigious National Oil and Acrylic Painters' Society's Best in America Show at the Dana Gallery in Missoula, Montana.
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