Bio
Jim Hubbman, with his new series entitled Photographic Paintings, is a photorealist in style working primarily in watercolor on paper. The detailed images he creates are still life tableaux. He begins a painting by uniting odd materials and arranging them to make an engaging, realistic image. As he builds a narrative scene, the artist juxtaposes the original functions of the featured objects with contrasting physical properties of shape, color and mass. His photorealist watercolors have the appearance of a digital image with a surreal twist.
St. Louis-based watercolorist Jim Hubbman completed a fine arts degree at Maryville University in Saint Louis. He has spent several years as a commercial illustrator and graphic artist along with raising a family. Over the years, he has gathered stories and observations which he has incorporated into his paintings.
Artist's show statements
November 2006
Context is Everything: Watercolor Series
Look in your wallet or in your desk drawer. Full of, well, stuff, right? Little bits and pieces of paper, odd items and things that are useful in ways you don’t even think about. All those things, their context is defined by their use in your everyday life. Ironically, they don’t often merit too much attention until they are used up. Old pictures, postcards, keys, pencils. You don’t notice them until you realize you’re done with them and they are only taking up space.
I’m so glad you don’t always throw those items away, but drop the old pictures and toys and junk into garage sale boxes. They end up in secondhand stores and other fun places, their context stripped away through lack of use.
Ripe for re-definition, I call it. Stick those bits together in places and combinations their original makers never dreamed about, and a new picture emerges, a new use – as actors on an odd little stage. Instead of unlocking a physical door, that old key becomes part of an open narrative. A story with no tight outline, and no end in sight. My story and yours?
On Not Leaving Well Enough Alone: The Descent Into Printmaking: The Mezzotint Series
I don’t know many artists who settle for one medium for too long, so it didn’t surprise me to find that another method of image making started to look attractive to me as well. In my case, I had just about climbed on top of the watercolor techniques I needed to master in order to make the sort of images that were satisfying, when I visited the public library and browsed the art books.
There I found, almost by accident, a book about an old, and relatively obscure printmaking technique called Mezzotint. Flipping the pages, I saw these wondrous images with an amazing range of atmosphere, built of rich tones. I knew then that I would be making pictures with this sort of technique. Two or three years later, I managed to get on my feet with mezzotinting, and here you can see some of the results. Who knows where the medium will take me next? I sure don’t.
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