Jenny Scobel at Thomas Erben - New York

If the external world bursts with dazzling color, the domain of the psyche exists in somber black and white, accented with sooty shades of gray. Or so it seems in the work of Jenny Scobel, whose graphite-and-gesso drawings conjure a deeply personal realm of memory and obsession, resting on uneasily suppressed angst. The results are exquisitely crafted but rather hermetic portraits.

Scobel's latest show featured 13 new drawings. As with her previous work, they are images largely of women set against landscapes. Scobel creates the portraits from photographs culled from various vintage publications; she is attracted to the face of a Slavic-looking young woman with a scarf over her head, taken from an advertisement, and an Italian girl who appeared in a 1950s photograph. Maintaining the illusion of photography through her meticulous renderings, she places the heads of her subjects on the half-length bodies of other figures, often celebrities such as Audrey Hepburn.

As backdrops for her figures, Scobel creates scenes often based on stills of classic Walt Disney and Betty Boop cartoons of the 1930s. Here, her mastery of graphite and her taste for the antiquated comes to the fore, capturing the goofy characters and monochromatic texture of Depression-era animation. In By and By (2002), for example, a wolf in sheep's clothing stalks across the panel; in Dancing with No Shoes (2002), a three-quarter profile of Jackie Kennedy perched on actress Anne Baxter's body stands before a cartoon skyline, the air full of crows. Adding a further layer of nostalgia, Scobel limns her composite portraits on gessoed wooden panels, then pours wax over the surfaces, sealing the drawings in a gritty sheen; the effect recalls black-and-white TV.

The artist works in series, repeating her source images, and the sight of identical female faces, each staring at the viewer with the same frozen expression, creates a disquieting effect. Scobel seems to suggest a split between the soul-freezing aspects of stardom, exemplified by the photographed women trapped in their gender roles, with a more psychologically liberated existence symbolized by the cartoons. Even so, the artist's disparate styles of portrait and cartoon clash with only a flicker of emotional spark. Despite their skillful rendering, Scobel's works seem as yet too inward-looking to reveal the full extent of the anxiety latent in their psychological depths.

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