It isn’t easy to categorize the lush, felted works of San Francisco-based artist James Gobel, but they fall somewhere between quilting, painting, and mosaic. To complicate matters, Gobel’s art is at once masculine and feminine, homey and theoretical, high art and grounded craft.
Made primarily with felt, yarn, and paint, his work has a relaxed sensibility that belies his meticulous process. In homage to “bears,” a subculture of gay male identity, each image features a large man — or two — blessed with the smooth grace of royalty and a rosy glow. Though the hefty men lounge in elegant repose or concentrate earnestly, Gobel’s guys aren’t the stuff of slick fashion spreads. Rather than skinny jeans or designer suits, they don flannel shirts and suspenders, John Deere tees and jeans, at peace with their big bellies and broad faces.
While crafting a fresh image for big men, Gobel has also created a unique process for making fabric-based paintings. Starting with a photograph, he transforms it into a drawing on canvas and then carefully glues yarn over the drawn lines, effectively
sketching with string. He traces the negative spaces between lines to make detailed templates, and then cuts shapes from either wool or acrylic felt. Gobel doesn’t sew pieces to the canvas, but rather glues each one in place before painting in details (yes, that’s glued felt in the image above). More recently, he’s taken to embroidering for added specificity.
Gobel, an associate professor at California College of the Arts, has shown his works in many exhibitions, including the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and the Kravets/Wehby Gallery in New York.
He concedes that “some people are startled by the nature of the subject matter,” and while he recognizes his work’s role in helping to change attitudes and subvert stereotypes, Gobel isn’t preaching so much as adoring. He likes his characters and the way they look; the colorful tapestries, he says, make fat men “seem more approachable, or irresistible, because they have this look like a cuddly bear.”
—Annie Buckley
>> James Gobel’s Felt Art: marxzav.com
Photograph courtesy of James Gobel
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