Blair Hobbs spread out on the basement floor of the Auburn, Alabama, house she grew up in, helping herself to huge pieces of poster board-sized paper and other supplies her art-professor mom stashed in a room down there.
“I would spend days drawing the interiors of houses,” Oxford artist Hobbs said, recalling her earliest art-making memory. Two lines turned into a three-story house, divided into rooms for the furniture she would draw next. “And, I would do that over and over and over and over again.”
“That was pretty much on the cold basement floor, (when I was) probably 8 years old, drawing home interiors,” she added, laughing fondly as she pictured the long-ago scene. “Little weirdo,” she called herself, but perhaps those memories were just an early sign regarding her future career. Her second-grade art teacher Jackie Mockbee was married to architect and teacher Samual “Sambo” Mockbee. Perhaps that had an influence, too.
Hobbs’ current artwork explores the interiors of her own mind, mining dreams, memories and impressions for the drawings, handwritten scraps and shiny elements that come together with such playful intrigue in an exhibit this month at Fischer Galleries in Ridgeland, Mississippi.
Fourteen works comprise the show “Flights and Visions,” on view through Nov. 29, 2025, at Fischer Galleries. Birds and winged insects make frequent appearances, as does the female figure, often outfitted with the wings of an angel.
Hobbs’ art falls into the mixed-media category, but that label seems drab for such bright concoctions, where iridescent tape, sequins, micro glitter and other sparkly bits embellish the canvases and enhance her drawings. Asked for an improved descriptor, Hobbs mused, “I should make up something. Bling?” She settled on “mixed bling” with a delighted laugh. Much better fit for works like “Dream Noodling” with its catfish twinkling in sequins, and “There Is Gold in Your Garden” with its gold leaf “rain.”
“It’s whimsical; it’s fun,” Fischer Galleries owner Marcy Fischer Nessel said of Hobbs’ art. “Being able to look at a piece of art, and it makes you smile,” Nessel marveled. “Plus, it’s fascinating. There’s so much that she incorporates in her work that makes it captivating and interesting.”
Discovering Symbology Through Color
Hobbs was a senior lecturer of creative writing at the University of Mississippi for 28 years, teaching American literature, composition and creative writing. Now retired, she is free to focus more time on the art that she has been producing and showing for decades. Her art is strongly rooted in storytelling, and literature is among her inspirations.
“With my interest in poetry and literature, I like to have texts that guide me, and then give me color,” Hobbs said. “I love to read a text for art, because it’s a lot different than reading for the pleasure of reading. I’m reading for things that I could draw; I’m reading for colors that an author puts on the page. And, a lot of times, I discover some symbology in the colors … that I never would have noticed, reading for pleasure.”
An example would be Temple Drake’s hair color-change from red to black in William Faulkner’s “Sanctuary”—a realization as she worked on a previous show, “Hot Messes in Southern Literature.”
“Her dye job from being a college girl grows out during the process of her time with Popeye, and the symbology of that is striking,” Hobbs said. For a show based on Flannery O’Connor for Spalding Nix Fine Art in Atlanta, she realized for the first time how often the author, whose works she had taught, used the color of the sky to create the mood of a scene.
Drawing began for her “Flights and Visions” works on a trip to Italy with her husband, John T. Edge, last March. “My dreams were really vivid,” she said. A central work, of a woman with Christmas cacti growing out of her skin, came from a dream about her mother’s Christmas cactus (a plant Hobbs now has and treasures), doing just that to her.
“That was after John T. and I spent a lot of time in churches, and seeing stigmata on Jesus everywhere you turned,” she said. In her dream, the plant’s needles pierced the stigmata, and red blooms became the blood. “It wasn’t a bad dream. It was kind of cool.”
Angels and other flying things commanded more of Hobbs’ attention. She needed an intellectual break after intense work for her Flannery O’Connor exhibition, she said, and joked, “I read so much, I felt like somebody should have handed me a Ph.D. at the end of that show.”
Look and Lean
Hobbs took a freer approach with “Flights and Visions.” The bird feeders outside her studio in Oxford, and even a few specific visitors to them, provided fodder. The pair of red-bellied woodpeckers in “Frances and Francis Have an Empty Nest” came from life, as Hobbs watched the loner boy woodpecker she named Frances, finally show up with a lady friend. Then she spotted fledglings coming to the suet feeder. “It was like a little miracle,” Hobbs said.
Handwritten scraps bookend the birds on a tree trunk in this piece, telling of the “yard of joy” when the birds wed. Even a spaceship showed up at the reception, the story goes. That flying saucer hovers in an upper corner of the artwork.
“You know, when you have an empty nest, when your child goes away, it’s like, ‘What the heck happened? Where’d he go?’” Hobbs said. “It’s such an abrupt change in your family. Like, one day they’re there, and then they’re gone. It’s kind of like an abduction.”
“Playing Out at Night” honors fond memories of growing up in a neighborhood full of kids and the simple summer fun of collecting lightning bugs or playing kick-the-can as daylight faded to dark. “I’ve been worried about our lightning bugs because they’re growing sparse. I wanted to make a little tribute to those beautiful insects,” Hobbs said.
An angelic, aproned woman calls her child inside for supper and another wears a lightning bug on her dress—all underneath a lime green crescent moon face and an explosion of daisies.
In another, an angel in flight swoops over a marsh of wildflowers, water lilies and fleur de lis. “I See a Swamp Baby” harks back to a midnight swamp tour out of New Orleans. Hobbs particularly remembers the scary sight from a bridge, when a light shone into the water showed what lurked under the surface.
“There were the biggest alligators I’ve ever seen, and they were stacked up like Jenga pieces,” she recalled. The art’s alligator, wearing a birthday hat and encased in a bubble, is not rendered in an intimidating fashion at all, though, instead making a charming allusion to why Hobbs considers the alligator a fertility symbol in her family.
The artworks’ sparkle and shine prove an irresistible lure to look closer, read the handwriting and absorb the visual riches. The reflective properties of all that bling bring a bonus. A guest who looks closely enough may actually find themselves as part of her works.
That approach works just right for Hobbs, too. “The happiest I am is watching somebody look at my art and lean in,” she said. “Not just stand there in front of it or walk past it, but lean in.” She paused, letting the emotional weight of such moments sink in. “That just kills me.”
“Flights and Visions” will remain on display at Fischer Galleries (118 W. Jackson St., Ridgeland) through Saturday, Nov. 29. Admission is free. For more information on the exhibit and on the gallery’s hours of operation, call 601-291-9115 or visit fischergalleries.com.