He explains that his grandfather always reminded him to be consistent about the direction the sails and the flags were blowing. “You had to pay attention when you drew a ship to make sure the sails and flag were going the same way, ” he said. “You'll see paintings of sailboats where the sails are filled with wind going one way and the flag is flying the opposite way. That's when you know people are drawing from an idea they have in their minds. They're not observing from real life. Or if they are, they're looking but not seeing. In any case, it's all about the details.”

That simple lesson—by learning to observe, you pay attention to the details—manifests itself time and time again in Hoffmann's work. Careful attention is paid to forms, shadows and light, color changes, gradations. How light reacts on a three-dimensional form is a favorite subject. A command of all of these is prevalent in the majority of his oeuvre; they are indeed what characterize his paintings.

Think outside the box

But it wasn't always this way.

His first three years at renowned Brooklyn, NY's Pratt Institute in the early 1980s found the budding painting major struggling to find a style of his own. Caught up in the traditional thinking that painting was one discipline and sculpture another and never the twain shall meet, Hoffmann labored to finish what he started. He was working mostly from the figure at the time, but the figure became less and less important to him. Light, shadows, and shape commanded his attention more and more. But where to begin the dichotomy?

Then, an epiphany.

“In critiquing my work, a professor told me 'if something doesn't work, cut it out,'” recalled Hoffmann. So he did just that.

A few days after the conversation, very late one night while working on a large painting, he became frustrated with parts that weren't working. “I actually took a razor blade and took those parts off the canvas,” Hoffmann said. “I found that what I was left with satisfied me. The painting was freed from its rectangular canvas. I felt very good, very energetic, because of breaking away from the rectangle.”

A style emerges

Keyed up, the artist went on to create a large new body of work in a very short stretch of time. He turned to paper instead of canvas because he could cut it more easily and thus work much faster. As he became more comfortable with removing parts of the paper to create shapes, he progressed to adding other parts to further change the look of those shapes. He experimented with metals and other materials too.

“It's wasn't a matter of looking at the materials and cutting away parts that were not necessary,” he stated. “It was more like finding the shape of the painting on the material—the paper, the wood, whatever—identifying that and freeing it from its borders. You no longer had a superfluous foreground or a background to deal with if it didn't add anything to what you were trying to accomplish.”

Later on, when Hoffmann presented his new works to his professor he found out that this was not what the instructor meant. But at that point this newfound concept of freedom had taken over. He began seeking out others who had also broken away from the traditional view of painting. In examining their work he was soon able to find his own vocabulary.

By 1983-84, he had clarified and defined his own new style. A recurrent image in his early work was the human face, actually a semblance thereof. Having spent much time on NYC subways, Hoffmann observed the culture of chosen isolation so inherent in the cramped cars, where the huddled masses stare vacantly ahead, avoiding eye contact and with it any human connection. From there arose the quasi-shapeless faces devoid of what is not being used to their fullest potential, a blunt commentary on those that look but do not see, even if done out of social necessity.

Another interest was achieving balance in the juxtaposition of incongruent forms. Fragments of nature aside everyday mundane physical objects became unified as a whole through the use of color and placement. And as it still does today, the Artist's style often included presenting studies in complementary colors that achieve chromatic harmonies.

The only constant is change

It's a style that was still evolving however, much like Hoffmann's life. After graduating from Pratt, Hoffmann obtained a Masters in Secondary Education from Queen's College (NY) and taught art in the NYC schools for 2 years before succumbing to the frustration caused by a lack of funding for his programs.

“I think in my last year my budget was fifty cents per child for the entire year,” he recounts, somewhat bitterly.

A change in perspective was needed after that experience. The former art teacher then moved out to the eastern end of Long Island (NY), camping out on a 25-foot workboat he shared with a cousin and toiling in construction—which proved indispensable for honing his skills on framing his art constructing his paintings and dealing with surfaces on which to hang his works. After some time he settled in Suffern, NY and opened his first studio on Lafayette Avenue in 1989. Of all places, it was in a second story racquetball club.

“The club was losing members so they let me rent one of the courts to use as studio space,” Hoffmann explained. “The high ceilings were perfect for the size and scope of my work. The only draw back was the wood floor, which meant no metalworking."

Hoffmann had become enamored with metalworking while in college after finding out that it wasn't as hard to work with as he thought. “You can, as an artist, make it do whatever you want,” he said.

Still, his new studio had ample room for his woodworking tools, including a prized Shopsmith 1989 model. He immediately began the switch from paper to wood. Always a delicate material to work with, paper picks up moisture and is not the best material for a cut-out form. As a result Hoffmann was forced to mat and frame his paper cut-outs behind glass. This contradicted his ultimate vision of shaped pieces “hanging directly on a wall, not in isolation, which in a sense is what putting a piece in a frame is.”

A move to an even larger studio in Suffern a few years later, this time to a combined live-workspace for which he helped draft the town ordinance, further cemented this direction. Wood proved to be a material he could better control, was dimensionally stable, and with it was gained the ability of each piece to better interact with the pieces surrounding it. Within several years, the artist entered the mature phase that he continues with today.

No metaphors please

While Hoffmann tends to conceptualize his work with profound imagery, he's not one to tout his artwork as a metaphor for his life. Or anyone else's.

He's just an individual with creative ideas and a need to get them out and express them, much like everyone else.

“Everybody has in them something that they are passionate about, something they do for themselves because it's a way to communicate a part of themselves to the outside world. For me, art is very much that. ”

He does hope, however, that viewers will become engaged by his work and draw inspiration—or whatever else they need—from it. It's for this reason that many of his works go untitled. In the absence of any labels viewers are free to find their own interpretations of his work. In other words, to be creative themselves. That's hard for some folks, though. While he doesn't mind the inquisitive peppering at his exhibitions about “what does it all mean?” he sees the need for more people to have confidence in themselves. He truly believes—perhaps it's the teacher in him, that unwavering faith in humankind's ability to learn—that everyone has the ability to be creative; they just need to tap into it.

“People don't tap into their creativity for different reasons. It's work, or they think it's all been done before, or it was something that they never learned to value. It's unfortunate, because they're missing out on a connection to themselves they don't even know about.”

A return to metalworking

These days Hoffmann is doing some connecting, or reconnecting rather, of his own. After some life changes that took his focus away from creating artwork he's back in the studio, this time in White Plains, NY. And although he was precluded from creating, the ideas never ceased coming. Most of them are in the half a dozen or so sketchbooks he managed to fill in his non-working period; he carries one with him all the time.

While his new place isn't as large as his previous spaces, this time it's on the ground floor. That means he has the chance to again work with metals.

“There will be things I can do in metal that I couldn't do with wood; changes in the shapes and forms and I can bend metal in ways that wood and paper cannot as easily be bent. The additive and subtractive process is much more direct with metal: two pieces of metal are cut to shape and welded. With wood, it's a lot more steps to make the joints work.”

Regardless of the medium, shaped pieces are where he will continue to work. They provide constant challenges and avenues for exploration.

“I'm really happy with what I'm doing,” he said, smiling. “It's a great place to be.”