Christopher James Hoffman

Christopher James Hoffman Biography

Christopher James Hoffman   b. 1966

• 1984 Graduated from Orono High School
• 1984-86 Bemidji State University - Fine Art
• 1986-87 University of Minnesota - Fine Art
• 1987-88 Colorado State University - Fort Collins - Fine Art
• 1988-89 University of Minnesota - Fine Art

The following entrepreneurial and art-related endeavors:

• Hopkins Fine Art - Hopkins, MN 1986-87 - Owner - Fine Art Gallery
• A Sandy Rhododendron - Sandy, Oregon 1990-2001 - Owner - Horticulture
• Project Alpha, Inc. - Portland, OR 1995-2001 - Founder - Web development
• Managed Artwork, Inc.  Incline Village, NV - 2001- Current - Artist/Gallery Software
• Hoffman Art, llc, Buffalo, MN - 2014 - Current - Owner/Founder
• One Division Art, llc.  Buffalo, MN - 2017 - Current - Owner/Founder

Christopher James Hoffman Statement

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".