Laura Hoffman

‘Adorable Laura Hoffman: Wine Emporium, Power Tools, and Thursday Extravaganza Studio Party

| Suzanne Edminster at Saltworkstudio

Laura Hoffman is red wine, resin, power tools, prints and parties.  I have NEVER stopped by her studio without being welcomed and shown fabulous art and a great time.   I’m not sure how we met:   the Barracks and SOFA seem miles apart in more than distance.  How to characterize her distinct style? Monumental, fractured classical ladies in gender-bent attire, with a mythic twist?  The feminine archetype of all ages, tweaked?  Beamish frabjous Alices, like Lewis Carroll on oil paint fumes and Sonoma wine?

The Wine Emporium, source of viticulture  and visual delights, hosts wonderful art exhibitions.  Many thanks to James Haug and his exquiste palate (or is it palette?)  for both wine and art.  Laura’s show can be enjoyed, along with the Wine Emporium’s signature tastings, until early January.  If you haven’t been into the Wine Emporium in Sebastopol, you’ve missed James’ extensive knowledge, a stock of hard-to-find fine wines, and his open hospitality.  My slideshow below show’s Laura’s opening, and the Wine Emporium site hosts an online gallery of Laura’s work.  My show starts Labor Day 2012. Do drop by to taste the wine and see Laura’s ladies.

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As for the power tools, well, you’ll have to ask Laura.  In January I’ll  be playing with her sanders in her studio.  We’ll be trying  interesting new techniques for collaging whole animals and people on to our surfaces!  Just kidding. Well, sort of.

Mythic News: Laura invites so much to play in her paintings.  The collage borders teem with action and embedded symbols. Look at the little stories embedded in the details: a swingset in a watermelon, ships, nuts, shells.  I particularly like her baroque little horizon lines which sprout more heiroglyphic narrative.  Take a look at the wonderful photo in the slideshow of an avalanche ofher collage sources:  they seem like the thoughts the ladies are thinking– coy, oracular, silly, or dreamy.The huge delicacy of the work  is, well, a delicious, huge delicacy.  Sweetmeats for the holiday indeed.  Fruits of flesh, seasoned with a saucy mind.  Pastries for the soul. Lauradorable.

The Cave Painters Were Really Pretty Good Artists, for Cave Men!

| Suzanne Edminster at Saltworkstudio

Spotted horses probably existed way back then, says a new genetic report.  This means that the cave painters weren’t just having a great time making a cool, fun, repetitive dot pattern on their creations, but were somehow representing AN ACTUAL HORSE.  DNA now proves that the cave painters were “good.”  Good means realistic in painting.  We wouldn’t want cave painters painting their dreams, now would we?

I salute  the writer,  Alicia Chang,  for pursuing this connection. And the article in the NY times is more fleshed out… or more boned out, because that’s where they got the DNA.   But these articles proceed from a  number of assumptions that make me a bit crazy.  Here’s a list. Ancient artists couldn’t paint realistically.  Ancient artists make “primitive” art.  Ancient artists just sorta prayed to animals or grooved on them but didn’t observe them.  Ancient artists didn’t really know about paint application, media, and drawing.  Ancient artists weren’t da Vinci, or even Dali (who is actually a super-realist using the images in a surreal way).

In fact, recent research strongly implies that ancient people observed the animals so closely that they recorded the small changes in appearance and behavior in different seasons and during mating times.  They applied paint with brushes, air, organic materials like moss or hide, and fingers. They always used as many colors as they could, including greens and purples.  They used lamps and scaffolding to paint in high places.  And as Werner Herzog’s new film Cave of Forgotton Dreams  shows,  they clearly used the three-dimensional stone as part of their media, as well as animation techniques and a convention called “twisted perspective.”  Which I love, because it’s twisted. 

But the thinking remains either/or.   Was it realism or surrealism?  Science or art?    Why not both?

  And now I have  an excuse to put in my favorite little spotted horse, the Dawn Horse from my dad’s 1963 high school science textbook.  I also found newly released Lascaux cave photos from the 1940’s in this amazing Life photo essay.  I adore Lascaux with all my stone-and-iron-oxide  heart.

 I did a little Honey Bear sketch of  to honor Hezog’s cave bears, whose skulls decorate the floors of Chauvet .  My father, Bob Edminster, who passed away this year, loved  honey and told a mean Eeeeeeyow Bear bedtime story.  This picture is for you, Werner Herzog and Bob Edminster.

  Mythic News:  Hey, it’s 11-11-11! I give you here a link to my favorite visionary, Caroline Casey, who talks about eleven, and de-apocolizes the day.  Eleven is a threshold number: go ahead and step over.

Studio news:  the divine Laura Hoffman, along with her ladies, women, folk-art motifs, resins, and power tools– yeah, baby– will be our guest artist on the blog next week.  Don’t forget the A Street Studio’s innocent-yet-decadent Winterblast! Tomorrow!

A special thanks to Susan Cornelis, who has been encouraging me to sketch and shared her super-secret material list with me.  See her wonderful travel sketchbook-collage techniques here.