Eleanor Hubbard: Art for the Ages

One thing is certain: personal attention is never my goal. It’s all about what the handmade violet pastel can do to a piece of white sandpaper if it’s slightly baked. Finding out ‘what if’, the excitement of discovering new challenges, especially impossible ones. So what if the pastel burns up in the oven, or if the entire drawing washes away under water—there’s always a spark of discovery in the disasters to let the art surprise the artist.

- Eleanor Hubbard   

           How refreshing to come upon an artist so blithely and magnificently indifferent to the crude stratagems and celebrity-seeking career moves of the contemporary art market. Eleanor Hubbard goes her own way, the only way she knows: she is an artist who lets her senses and feelings, her agile mind and prodigious imagination connect with the glories of the visual world and the interior realm of the imagination. Her chosen path leads to her investing works of art with these sensibilities—think ants, glaciers, or tulips, modulated in resonant color, sensuous form and expressive line. The intimately personal is endowed with universal import. Because her goal is to distill the beauties of nature into a magical elixir of wonderment and joy, Hubbard’s art is always moving the eye toward poetic abstraction.

             Egocentric success in an art world driven by headline auction prices, brand-name wall power, shock and awe on social media, and various political enthusiasms, is the last thing on this artist’s radar screen. The high-spirited conversationalist is unmoved by commercial strategies; rather, she lets creative instinct, honed by experience and fired by genuine inspiration, guide her hand. Hubbard is incapable of cant either in art or life. Hers is the art of the real deal. 

             Such no-nonsense traits and firm convictions grew out of the artist’s deep New England roots to be grafted onto the Philadelphia brand of aesthetic observation during her academic years. While mastering fine drawing and compositional skills, two seemingly opposite mentors entered Hubbard’s life to profound effect, the rule-breaking nineteenth-century  realist Thomas Eakins and the twentieth-century risk-taker John Cage: “In paying close attention to nature these two vastly different characters taught me an neutral way of seeing, and that changed everything.”

     Hubbard’s technical mastery—a compulsive draughtsman whether on a sketch pad at an early age or on an iPhone today—is expressed as poet Billy Collins scatters words, with freewheeling panache that disguises technical polish. This is an artist who at the age of eight taught herself to paint by copying Edvard Munch reproductions, “Adding oil, subtracting oil, I was determined to duplicate those striated brush strokes on my third grade lunch hour.” And who, as an undergraduate, immersed herself for a year in that artist’s Scandinavian light, “…where Munch’s startlingly intense colors were clearly not inventions but an atmospheric peculiarity of Norway.” That experience increased her understanding of craftsmanship, the handworked object, and the inevitable overlapping of interior and exterior worlds. A portrait with such distinctive ambiguity is the impasto oil painting Without You, in which the figure of a cat is at once precise and abstract, a presence and yet, as the title implies, an absence. 

    Manifest across the full range and various mediums of Hubbard’s oeuvre, whether in jigsaw land masses glimpsed at 30,000 feet (see Blue Green Land), a wondrous oceanic sunset (see Maine Point), or an iridescent insect carelessly wandering through the studio (see Goes Both Ways) are her three characteristic vantage points: aerial, up close, and medium range. While she claims to see the world much like a dragonfly in a complex arrangement of color, her latter-day transcendentalist’s vision always emanates from those three fixed points. It’s a perspective on creativity informed by spiritual values, and exemplifies the artist’s subjective connection to organic matters whether mundane as Oh Rats, a portrait of two winsome vermin, or sublime as Oslo, Round Midnight.

        Many artists exhibit exceptional dexterity, some share capacities for imaginative delineation, a few penetrate the heart of things and return with insight into their journey. Rare are artists like Hubbard who manage the full Monty. She has the visual craft of Thoreau’s nature prose, the compositional and tonal subtlety of Morandi, and the spiritual poignancy and wit of Emily Dickinson on one of her more garrulous days. None of the popular isms—conceptualism, formalism, minimalism—or the various strains of political correctness and grievance art find a place in her studio practice.

          Nor has she felt it necessary to define herself by adopting a signature style or totemic subject matter, rather she has let the subject find her, working its way into her brush strokes, slowly or suddenly announcing itself. Count on her we can for a clear intentional response whether to nature as an external element or to that other orbit into which she dives when crossing the threshold from objective reality to the world of invention.

        Color may be Hubbard’s favored paramour but it’s a brand of color that does not shout down the skies. For this artist, even in Cut Ups, an especially graphic diptych, color is tone, hue, and subtle modulations deployed to interact with the eye, a fuse igniting a jaunty optical pantomime of oxen trotting inexorably toward their fate. Here as in all Hubbard’s work balance is key: between light and dark, opacity and transparency, flatness and impasto, meaning and abstraction, outer reality and inner eye. 

         At heart she’s a practical Yankee, an empiricist, a fan of the inductive method, letting Nature set the stage for her endeavors, giving voice to the quantum infinities of life - observed, studied, and reinvented. Hubbard’s palette is nothing if not deliciously symphonic, like Wallace Stevens’ vocabulary it’s a delectable menu of rainbow tones, a pattern book of sensuous abstraction. In Keeping an Eye On It, a mourning dove appears against a violet background like an allusive dream or symbol, soft and hard-edged, yet painted on an iPhone. 

        Always present in Hubbard’s dive into digital or material exploration is a touch of the masters: George Inness’ generous-feeling hand; a mysterious Whistlerian ambiguity that eschews explicit narrative for the implied; Dürer’s fastidious draughtsmanship; Giotto’s ineffable combination of the symbolic with the particular, and even a dash of Emersonian reverence for the hidden spirit world conjured through drawings in prehistoric caves that she herself has explored.

             The diversity of subject matter, technique, and medium in Hubbard’s opus is impossible to pigeonhole. How many artists to today are equally  accomplished in oil, watercolor, pastel, and digital media much less able to range far and wide across still life, figuration, and landscape. She seems to have as many competing realms of interest as “Game of Thrones” has kingdoms. And yet, of course, they’re all part of the same natural kingdom and share an affinity for ravishing color, the quiddities of mesmeric shape and structure, and a formal rigor that is both entrancing and fascinating for an internal logic that defies easy analysis. In the artist’s love of repeated motifs in various modes there is a Monet like penchant for serial subjects rendered in different lights and times of day, along with the envelope of atmosphere that is often his real subject. In making a motif of the straight line, the more contemporary Sol LeWitt is another serial repeater, as is Hubbard with over 400 painted versions of José the ox. While LeWitt’s straight line and Monet’s Rouen cathedral have geometry and architecture as reference, this ox supplies an existential narrative, one completely alive in her imagination. She records the visage—the way the ox looks—while at the same time describing the creature’s idiosyncratic stance on life. Representation is not merely archetype. Look at the ants she paints with pastel on sandpaper. Together they may be singing “Hi ho! hi ho! It’s off to work we go!”, but each one sings in its own unique voice. Neither all form nor all content, a symbiotic energy develops between the two; reality emerges in the context of her drawing, in the world as drawn by Eleanor Hubbard.

         An abiding love of poetry and music provides the rhythmic underpinnings of Hubbard’s elastic treatment of her chosen subjects. She grew up listening to recitations of the classics by family members, while the sound and cadence of Modernist poets Stevens, Eliot, Auden, and soulmate Emily Dickinson are deeply engraved in her consciousness. Bach’s “Goldberg Variations” leap to mind when examining Hubbard’s still life imagery, expressing associations across time and space. More Than an Orange embodies an inner radiance, cool and thoughtful like Dickinson’s “certain slant of light on a winter’s afternoon,” while Bee There explodes with compressed energy as if a pin had been put to some Pop Art balloon. The gestural dynamic of free flowing impasto in the still lifes Piece of Cake and Philadelphia Tuesday echo Morandi’s stillness, a-shimmer with tonal harmonies, but with just a touch of Wayne Thiebaud’s finger-lickin’-good creamy pigment. 18 Ways To Look At It is a juicy Bachian tour de force on theme and variations, and one can picture the artist’s exuberance as paint-smeared fingers spin the harpsichord ivories, her brushes. This is an artist who loves process, the more complicated the better, the tango of impetus and image as her materials – pastels, handmade papers, window screening, twine, brushes, oil sticks – all become her collaborators, a means to stop time. As Hubbard puts it: “By making art I can hold on to the present as it slips through my brush.”

             That she has a love for creatures great and small, there can be little doubt. Inhabitants of New England pastures are depicted cheek by jowl in Hubbard’s Martha’s Vineyard studio. Animal subjects may be poison to some artist’s today, but a moment’s sojourn amidst the artist’s barnyard cavalcade puts such fears to rest. The cats, oxen, birds, dogs, turtles—and bugs aplenty—populating her work are transformed into formal explorations of shape, pattern, and jittery color. Improvisations of Thelonious Monk weave their spell, especially his genius for dissonance and angular melodic twists. Curler and Without You can be enjoyed for their evocations of feline aloofness as well as for the graphic play of fictile shapes—a kind of two-dimensional counterpoint in which form and color bounce off the melody line. Homage, perhaps, to Matisse’s jazzy cutouts. The artist’s obsession with one particular ox is played out in a remarkable series of works in which—dare I say—oxymoronic juxtapositions of natural and synthetic color, playful foreground and background grids, and intricate cross-stitching patterns trumpet essential oxness—parallax visions as witty as they are beguiling. Somehow, with all the alliteration of color and metaphoric high jinks her subjects reverberate with the spirit of a bygone age, of a closeness to the land and its denizens, expressing an affinity for the biosphere that our present day detachment imperils. In Eleanor Hubbard, nature has found an ardent alchemist: passionate, witty and wise. Her art will live while the dross of today falls by the wayside.

         To my Tonalist eye, the ne plus ultra of her oeuvre is found in the magnificent landscapes that fully embody the deeply spiritual nature feeding the engine room of her artistic persona. In landscape her instinctual powers run free and true: feeling simply floods forth, whether from intimate watercolor or impasto-brazened oil. And again, her ability to convey majesty and tenderness, the sublime in the quiddity, or the epiphany of the incandescent moment—all rendered in a diversity of styles and formal approaches is simply astounding. Just three examples must serve as reference points: Salty and Quiet in gouache and colored pencil appears traditionally representational, and yet its studied observations of nature portray the artist’s timeless intent; Loud Sound uses a mix of digital and traditional media for a sizzling sensual energy akin to inspired finger-painting; while the lush gestural extravagance of oil paint in Maine Point speaks of untold marvels in a northern summer.