Jocelyn Hobbie
Jocelyn Hobbie
The history of figuration could be said to be the history of freezing specific moments. Following this thought, the figures in paintings divide, in relation to the onlooking viewer, in modes of address of extroversion and introversion, gazing out, apprising or sizing up the spectator, or caught unawares and gazing inward. Manet’s Olympia stares down the spectator/artist confrontationally, Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring glances over her shoulder with an expression both sympathetic and emphatic, De La Tour’s candle-lit maiden appears lost in devotional contemplation, or the working girl in a painting by Hopper might be plunged into her own sunlit isolation. My paintings fall into the introspective category with subjects looking inward; the scenarios turn on the psychological tension of imagined but real women in circumstances of private reverie. I favor subjects and situations where the protagonists are not self-conscious, depicting what women might do when they are not being watched.
Although the subjects of my paintings are deliberate, I take care not to impose my private meaning on the viewer. In my exploration of the feminine, the narrative is both specific and ambiguous, suggestive but not explicit. I endeavor to maintain that balance, to express myself and also let it be up to the spectator to interpret, allowing for an exchange that is intended to be more mysterious. My paintings are motivated by strong emotion yet expressed in restrained form. The scenarios depicted are mostly about aloneness, high-keyed solitary emotional states. The women are sensitive, ecstatic or in despair, monkish, anxious, diligent, manic. I make them tragic-comic or romantic. I love the idea of somebody alone in a room, working away in private; engaged in an inner life even if it’s painful: transforming the sense of aloneness and anxiety into a sense of braveness and inspiration.
I am very close to my subject matter emotionally. For example I did a painting of a nun who is also a painter: I had a fascination with what it might be like to be a nun and then I realized it seemed similar to being a painter; something about isolation, sacrifice and devotion but also love and beauty. I’m interested in what is "personal"; the motivations, fears. By revealing or exposing vulnerability, it can get turned inside-out into something honest and therefore empowering. There is also humor and the ridiculousness of certain endeavors. The palette, rendering and resonance of these paintings are sharp and clear, imbued with a kind of Technicolor solidity, as if Bob Clampet’s original Looney Tunes animations collided with Ingres and was laced with the heightened awareness and heated expressivity of the Mia Farrow character in Rosemarie’s Baby.
