Q & A with Nick Hobbs
October 11, 2024
Nick Hobbs (b. 1997) shares with Storage about his studio practice and current interests. Hobbs' solo exhibition Out There Somewhere is on view at Storage APT on The Bowery from October 18th - November 16th, 2024.
Storage: How do you know when the spark of an idea will turn into a finished work?
Nick Hobbs: I usually only know after spending way too much time playing with the idea in my sketchbook. Too often I don’t know until I actually start, only to realize twelve hours in that it’s not going where I thought it would. It’s hard to put my finger on what makes an image work or not, so it’s even harder to make predictions about it.
S: How significant is experimentation in your artistic process?
NH: It might not be obvious looking at the work in the show, but these drawings are the place I landed at the tail end of grad school after two years of frenzied experimentation. I felt like I was having an identity crisis every semester – a few I won’t talk about and I promise you won’t find images of, but I still carry a lot of discoveries from that time with me in these quiet little drawings. Many of the “early” space drawings in this body of work came from making animations with images from space probes.
S: What's happening in your studio right now?
NH: I’m trying to push the boundaries on what kinds of subjects fit into my little universe of images. Right now there’s a ceramic lioness pulled from the background of a Seinfeld screenshot on my drawing board.
S: How does your background or personal experiences influence your art?
NH: Long before I thought of myself as an artist, I was an amateur astronomer. It kept me in a constant awareness of a cosmological context that’s easy to take for granted otherwise. It also taught me patience and instilled a love for dark and quiet. I still work primarily at night, it feels familiar from those years when I’d stay up all night with a telescope.
S: How do you know when a work is complete? What signals you that you are at your stopping point?
NH: Often I’m limited by the wear of the paper. Every pencil stroke wears down the tooth on the surface until eventually it becomes too dull and smooth to receive anymore graphite. I have to plan for that unavoidable deadline, which is good because I might pick at a drawing forever if I could.
