The Drawing Books

 … My drawings are about the place where the subject of a drawing and the act of drawing, and by extension the artist, merge.

Ditta Baron Hoeber has cultivated singular terms for the production of her brush and ink drawings that explore the unique possibilities of the handmade books that house them. The "place" she describes in her statement above is not only a site of communion between subject, artist, and medium. When experienced as she intends—with the finished book presented on a table, not unlike the one shared by Hoeber and her models—it becomes a setting that includes the viewer and expands how we might think about the place of drawing itself.

Observational in nature, Hoeber’s portraits depict her subjects seated directly before her. The dimensions of these gazing faces, tilted shoulders and bent arms, as rendered, are never arbitrary. Instead, they match the exact scale of her own seeing, as if they were the result of tracing her view of each subject projected onto the page. This veracity of vision—the accurate registration of the topography of noses and cheekbones, eyelids and lips seen from specific angles—suggests a reference to the optics of the camera. It inevitably positions her drawings in relation to her photographs, in particular, those depicting individuals absorbed in their creative work. When taking such pictures—lens covering her face—Hoeber’s camera serves as a mask behind which she can conceal herself. When she draws, however, she is conspicuously present and vulnerable to her sitters. Given this exposure, Hoeber has found that she prefers models who are unselfconscious about being subjects despite being likewise absorbed, albeit in the more static behavior of the mind reading its own thoughts. Hoeber has found that female models with whom she develops a rapport are particularly adept at fostering this condition and comfortable sustaining it before her. Thus, the resulting portraits, in addition to depicting states of reflection, also document the specific distance between two women at a table, one looking intently at the other. This table, implied but never depicted, is analogous to a tripod, a mechanism that enables the stillness required to perform the “sustained act of will” that Paul Valery wrote was "essential to drawing” something as complex and vital as the human face. (1)

Hoeber’s approach to drawing acknowledges that it is a discipline, a form of learning that requires both proficiency and failure. (She discards more than keeps.) She draws the same model repeatedly, which she says, “teaches [her] to see.”  To prevent herself from referring to prior renderings of the same model during a session, she turns each finished drawing face down on the table. This ensures that she will look freshly at her subject as she begins the next drawing and, perhaps, presages the page-turning gesture intrinsic to the book that may eventually contain it.  It is this impulse to render something familiar as if she is seeing it for the first time that helps assert, as curator John Caperton has noted, that her drawings, while they are about so many things, “seem to be about drawing.”  (2)

Her models select their own poses, which range from postures characterized by contemplative ease to the occasional awkwardness that Hoeber enjoys. In a drawing session that extends up to three hours, each pose will last ten to twenty minutes. Despite the relatively limited working time, which she says, “acts as a pressure and generates intensity,” the results exhibit no sense of having been rushed.  Instead, the drawings register as networks of deliberate, if not hard-won marks, irregular lattices of indelible information and the concentrated attention that forged them.

The impulse to edit, intrinsic to her work in other mediums, tempers how she sees and what she chooses to depict. What is absent is as important as what is present. Rarely does she render the entirety of head and torso. Instead, she maps decisive views of volumes and contours making contact with each other. The flat, black trails left by her brushes have a weight that conveys a palpable sense of the tactile. As such, they make a subject of the myriad ways in which hands touch the flesh of the face, prop the head, or augment an expression or gaze. These points of contact, however fragmentary, appear complete on the page due to the mostly unwavering width of Hoeber’s strokes, which propose uncanny equivocations of strands of hair, folded fabric, fingers, chins, and palms.

Hoeber attributes any mistakes or extraneous lines not to some error of the hand or brush, but to something “poorly seen.” Ink cannot be erased, so she revises mistakes by covering them with white chalk and gouache. Sometimes she uses small pieces of paper—cut from the same sheet used for the original drawing—into a shape that covers the error when collaged onto the page. These repairs, which she allows to remain conspicuous—even in the rare instances when her books are printed in limited edition multiples—add elements of abstraction and quietly enhance their materiality.

The individual drawings that result from working with the same model for periods of months, or even years, are rarely ends in themselves. Instead, they accrue to generate a file from which Hoeber chooses specific examples that, when placed in particular sequence, make sense to her. These sequences are then transferred to the accordion-fold books that have become her signature vehicle. As is the case with her camera images and verse, the interactions between the drawings—along with all the non-discursive content that the resulting arrangements, rhythms, and open spaces allow—become more important than any individual drawing. 

While she has stated that she “puts things in books in order to show them,” the book, for Hoeber, also serves as a practical, structural, and conceptual framework for most of what she produces. We are, of course, accustomed to the form of the codex as an ideal conduit for the distribution of printed photographs and published verse. And while the notebook is a familiar format for studies and sketches, it is rarely employed to display finished drawings. Hoeber’s predilection for the one-of-a-kind book as a means to share these portraits questions conventions about the sanctity of unprotected drawings and proposes instead that we consider what might be gained by encountering them in a place such as this.

Mindful of the risks and challenges they pose to public exhibition, Hoeber’s books invite the viewer into a haptic, analog engagement with drawing. Eschewing the mediation of video documentation and computer screens increasingly used to facilitate the display of such work, her insistence on presenting her drawings in this fashion also sidesteps the hardware of wall-mounted frames and their assumption that drawings might be best experienced by a standing viewer peering through a pane of glass. Instead, Hoeber’s portraits remain hidden, resting, and waiting. To see them requires the impetus of curiosity as well as indulging in the solace that touching pages can invite. As she writes in one of her poems, “paper, in particular, is a comfort to the hand.” (3)

The physical continuity between the white pages and white jackets that bind them conflate the ground of each drawing with the structure of the book, thus proposing a more private setting for the portraits, a buffer from the noise of the world that might be likened to a white cube of the gallery space were it not so intimate.  In a representative example—with its date blind-stamped inside the jacket and its title (named for the sitter) inscribed lightly in pencil on the spine—as many as 6 to 15 drawings are composed in a sequence, generally one, sometimes two, to a spread. Depending on Hoeber’s choice to place drawings on facing pages, the images can present themselves as diptychs that animate the portraits and enliven the space between them, especially in those instances in which one drawing appears to be looking at another. Subtle shifts and seemingly infinitesimal differences in point of view accumulate, as they do in Hoeber’s writing and photographic books, to offer forms of discovery and immediacy that mirror her process of production. It is her drawing books, however, which perhaps come closest to reprising the scenarios of their making.  Seated at a table, a reader paging through one of these volumes at their own pace occupies roughly the same proximity to each portrait initially determined by Hoeber. The resulting books, thus, propose a tangible realm that enfolds artist, subject, medium, and viewer to elicit direct, if not unforeseen, modes of engagement.    

Richard Torchia, artist and Director, Arcadia Exhibitions.

Notes:

1) Paul Valery, “Degas, Manet, Morisot” (Paris, 1938), The Collected Works of Paul Valéry (Volume 12), translated by David Paul, New York, 1960. 

2) Comment conveyed by Hoeber to the author, March 2020.

3) Ditta Baron Hoeber, “Part III” (February 2018).