marie hobbs

• how not to think [19]
• sooner & later [13]

stockroom work

• jody fitzhardinge, marie hobbs: sooner & later essay, november 2013
• current cv

The most important components in my work are light and scale and a sort of pictorial logic which I seek to find and recognise anew in each painting. I can only stop working on a painting when some sort of satisfying complexity of relationships has been reached, even though it always remains tantalising and incomplete. I am always prepared to risk the painting in the hope of achieving a greater depth...

marie hobbs, 1998

The trigger for Marie Hobbs' paintings is often something actual, visual, or maybe a memory, which then finds its own trajectory... Marie takes a commonplace, familiar object, then liberates it into a space that doesn't locate it in a fixed setting. As one mark leads to another, a dynamic relationship develops between elements on the canvas, which may appear incongruous, while the demand to keep at it becomes a compulsion, to drive on until the painting gels and is alive in every aspect of its surface. This involves a terrific fearlessness: to lose in order to gain something deeper, to push and pull in order to take the subject beyond the limits of the literal, to give it a new, open and maybe paradoxical meaning. The objects become alive in their essence in their own space, free of grounding boundaries that might locate them on a domestic and recognisable ground - a table, a room...

Jody Fitzhardinge 2013.
Extract from "Marie Hobbs: Sooner & Later" exhibition essay