Cape Cod Voice
August 1, 2002

"James Hobin's visual personality is evolving, not split"

by Ellen LeBow

There are artists who create bodies of work that seem so disconnected that viewers would think that two artists produced them. But the artist will be able to trace every syntax, every consistency, every leap of understanding that webs the work together.

Necklacing the floor of James Hobin's temporary Wellfleet studio are a ring of dark, moody restless abstract paintings.

Their suggestion of landscape succumbs to the physicality of the paint in apocalyptic, sometimes tearing strokes; blood and cold moon blue, radioactive greens, sapphire, ochre. Transparent swaths of color smoke over colors beneath. There are hints of light on water. There are chunks of city, boulder, and human forms that make the paintings seem bigger than they are.

On the surface, this body of work appears to be a radical leap, a polar opposite of his "other" painting life.

For more than 10 years Hobin has been Boston's "park" artist, setting up an easel in the Boston Garden (the park, not the defunct stadium) before a ring of passersby and tourists, painting, among other classic Boston visions, the ever famous swanboats.

His park painting, which dominated his need to earn a living, may have threatened to dominate his progress in abstraction, until they slowly began too close in on each other, culminating in a precarious, excitable meeting.

Early high school days studying at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston began Hobin's dance with abstraction. "They sent us upstairs to copy the paintings, draw the sculptures and bring them down to talk about it," Hobin recalls. "I was struck by how the palette, rags and tools were more beautiful than the painting! I knew that there was some secret in that, in the spontaneous quality of how the rags and palette made themselves."

Hobin muses that abstract painters might object to his paintings' recent references to space or things, but he is clear about his objective. "What I've been trying to do is connect to the definite visual image of the world we know, inferred through something spontaneous."

After years of painting the same few Boston scenes hundreds of times, Hobin began to feel a shift in intent. Rather than just trying to capture what was in front of him, he began forming the idea first, using his subject matter as an adjustable element in the painting, rather than the goal.

As subtle as this sounds, when something internal reverses, when the painting comes first and the object second, it is a pivotal moment in the development of an original style. "

A painting style isn't a decision," Hobin says, "it's a result...People become a slave to what they are seeing, sometimes your eyes get in the way." As this change in Hobin's outdoor painting began to gain gravity, a stay in Truro a few years ago added momentum.

"The first few Truro paintings were kind of conventional," Hobin remembers. "Then I began walking around at night. The sky was dark, but the trees being darker, gave color to the sky.

"If you want the middle tones to look bright you have to make the darks really black - not a flat black, but something you feel you can put your hand into."

Fascinated by the quality of evening light devoid of street lamps and phosphorescent city glow, the paintings Hobin developed in Truro tried to catch the atmosphere of unobstructed night not by copying it, but by first seeing the abstracted painting in his mind's eye.

"I'd walk out at night, find the image, see the painting, go back in the daytime and sit there and paint it in the day, then go to the studio and turn it into a nighttime painting using gazing and wet-on-wet techniques I'd practised in my abstract paintings. They edged closer and closer to abstract while the abstracts edged closer and closer to color, form and perspective."

To the consternation of his daytime audience, Hobin began to paint the swanboats and park statues as if it were nighttime, too.

"That's one bit of information I got in Truro, I'm still working off that idea, to see under the surface of things."

And under the surface, Hobin has discovered an animated life. Eventually the painting starts speaking to you. Paintings have different personalities, you have to be willing to give the picture all it wants. The advantage of working regularly is that you get less attached to the process. If I work on something for two or three weeks and then wind up covering all but ten percent, I have to be willing to take the risk of giving it a new identity."

James Hobin's newest abstract work will be on exhibit for one week and opens August 2 at the McGuire Gallery, 349 Commercial Street in Provincetown.