Nick Hobbs
Many Worlds

The drawings in this show are interpreted from reference images disparately sourced from the internet and my own life. I draw slowly, building the surface in gauzy layers like glazes, periodically wiping the entire picture out with a chamois. The blurred after-image that results from this process provides fertile ground for discovery and forces me to continuously redefine the picture. The size of the drawings themselves is uniform, but subject matter oscillates freely between familiar and cosmological scales, juxtaposing seemingly irreconcilable worlds in intimate proximity.

My practice is heavily influenced by a lifetime of looking through telescopes as an amateur astronomer. In the dark cave of the eyepiece, every photon of light is significant in the faint image that emerges from the velvety surface of the night sky. Scale is confused in the eyepiece as well, providing the strange sensation of intimacy with distant objects of incomprehensible proportion. Weaving the mysterious and the familiar together becomes second nature at the telescope, an impulse I’ve carried with me into my drawing practice.