Biography:

Joel M. Upton graduated with a BA in American Studies from Rutgers University. He served as an officer in the Air Force, assigned to the NATO headquarters of the allied air forces of central Europe in Fontainebleau, France. He was a Fulbright Fellow in the Centre national de recherches “Primitifs flamands” at the Institut royale du Patrimoine artistique, in Brussels, Belgium and a Chester Dale Fellow at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. He received a PhD from Bryn Mawr College with a dissertation, published as Petrus Christus: His Place in Fifteenth-Century Flemish Painting. While teaching at Amherst College for forty-three years, he offered his students courses in the art and architecture of early Christian Europe, Romanesque and Gothic architecture in France, European art and architecture from 300 to 1500 CE, Dutch and Flemish painting from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, Ainoma: The Construction of Space in Japan., and seminars on the art of contemplative beholding.

Extensive travel in Japan and teaching American exchange students in the Associated Kyoto Program at Doshisha University led Upton to discover how the construction of space in Buddhist temples in Japan revealed a fundamentally different way of understanding the world. This experience, which he integrated with his teaching, inspired an increasing interest in exploring how we respond to works of art and in defining an art and practice of contemplative beholding, a journey that led him to create Contemplative Beholding: A Way of Life and Love.

Since retiring, he has lived in the highlands region of western Massachusetts in a home surrounded by ponds, gardens, and forest. From this place of stillness and quiet, he has sought to share his commitment to a path formed by the synonymy of art, beauty, and love in the embodied embrace of reconciliation.