Leigh Hobbs was born in Williamstown, a suburb of Melbourne, in Victoria, Australia but grew up in the Victorian country town of Bairnsdale.
After graduating from art school (Caulfield Institute of Technology - now Monash University) in 1973, his first job - at age 21 - was at Sydney’s Luna Park, an amusement park next to the Sydney Harbour Bridge, where he worked as an artist.
His initial task was to design the colour scheme for an antique carousel. However, during his time at the park he also created two large three dimensional characters called Larry and Lizzy Luna, which now reside at Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum.
For a major part of his working life Hobbs supported himself primarily by working as a secondary school art teacher, 1978 -2002.
In 1980 Hobbs had a one man show of his caricature sculptures at the Rex Irwin Gallery in Sydney. Between 1985 - 2010 Hobbs was a freelance contributing cartoonist for the Melbourne The Age newspaper. During this time The Age published a number of major profiles of Hobbs and his work.
These were on March 27th 1999, July 7th 2001, June 19th 2002, May 24th 2003 and March 24th 2007.
In 1984 Leigh Hobbs created a series of glazed ceramic tea pots in the shape of Melbourne's Flinders Street Station. These are in the collection of a number of galleries including the National Gallery of Victoria.
In 1999 Hobbs designed the colour scheme for the entrance to Melbourne’s Luna Park in St. Kilda. Between 1998 - 2002 a French and Australian co-produced animated cartoon TV series based on his Old Tom books was created and broadcast in Australia on ABC TV.
The National Institute Of Dramatic Art – NIDA - adapted Hobbs’s book Mr Chicken Goes To Paris for the stage in 2012. This book was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Awards in 2010 and is a popular title in the Musee du Louvre Bookshop in Paris.
Leigh Hobbs’s artwork, paintings, drawings, prints, illustrations and ceramics are to be found in numerous private collections, public art galleries, and institutions including the National Gallery of Victoria and the State Libraries of Victoria and Western Australia.
Read more about Leigh Hobbs: Bibliography
Famous quotes containing the words leigh and/or hobbs:
“Thank God! none of my children have an atom of poetry in their composition!”
—Augusta Leigh (1783–1851)
“The people needed to be rehoused, but I feel disgusted and depressed when I see how they have done it. It did not suit the planners to think how they might deal with the community, or the individuals that made up the community. All they could think was, “Sweep it away!” The bureaucrats put their heads together, and if anyone had told them, “A community is people,” they would not have known what they were on about.”
—May Hobbs (b. 1938)