Christopher James Hoffman

Forty-five years of painting and drawing have been a journey of removing "skill" from the artwork.  I'm very conscious of making the work speak to me albeit listening to where the piece wants to go.   Abstraction of vertical lines has been my most recent focus in which one of two things begins to surface... Landscape or Portrait.  Having done literally thousands of Plein air watercolors and thousands of portraits of people that I've never met or drawn from, these two basic forms take shape without thinking.  My interest is in uncovering the essence with as little skill as technically possible.  I routinely paint/draw with either hand and even with my feet to remove the technical skill.  I consider myself more of a medium... conduit to people and places but where the image becomes simply itself... without referring to any person or place... "self-referential".  A recent quote that came to me in 2021... "Painters paint paintings that cameras can't capture".