For so many years, Jocelyn Hobbie’s women have felt like enigmas. Wrapped in florals and decorative patterns, they meet us with their eyes, yet give almost nothing away. They seem mysterious, even a little haunting, and at the same time all-knowing, as if they understand something about us that we will never understand about them.
The pattern was never just decoration. Hobbie paints every blouse, skirt and bloom with such exacting care that it begins to work like armor: a lush, protective skin between the woman and the viewer. The more there was to look at, the less we seemed to know. Her surfaces are so smooth that the brush nearly disappears, and her figures appear held outside of time, vivid and perfectly still. In her hands, beauty has always been a kind of guard.
That is what makes A Rosy Fingered Dawn, her new exhibition at Fredericks & Freiser, feel like such a turn. For the first time, Hobbie has made the nude a sustained subject. The fabric is gone in many of the works. The patterned barrier that once kept these women at a distance has been peeled away, and what remains is bare skin, pale and luminous, almost startling against the saturated yellows, golds and flowers that surround it.
And yet these women are not exposed in the way we might expect. Their poses are open, sometimes deeply vulnerable, but there is nothing passive in them. They own their bodies. They hold our gaze, or decline to, entirely on their own terms. Where pattern once did the work of protection, the body itself now carries that charge: the fold of a waist, the line of a shoulder, a hand placed with intention. Even the titles, Anchor, Wingspan, Haven, suggest women who are grounded, expansive and self-sheltering all at once. Owls and butterflies drift through the paintings, and touches of gold leaf push some of them toward the language of icons, as though these figures are being raised from portraits into something closer to myth.
The mystery hasn’t vanished. It has changed shape. Before, Hobbie’s women hid in plain sight. Now they stand in plain sight, bare and unflinching, and they are no less sovereign for it. Openness, it turns out, can be its own kind of armor, and its own kind of power. —Evan Pricco
Read our full interview with Jessica and Andrew from Fredericks & Freiser from Issue 03 here.
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