OPENING: A New Way of Seeing - Art of Katie Hoffman

KATIE HOFFMAN The Triumph of Surrender

These days, Denver artist Katie Hoffman rarely knows what she’s painting, and that’s the way she likes it. Her unusual technique began five years ago: “I’d been working on a large canvas, and nothing was going right,” she says. “The more I tried to exert my will onto the canvas, the more it seemed to resist. I was ready to toss it, there was nothing to lose, so in desperation I applied cheesecloth and more paint to obscure what was there. Later I gouged at the surface. As this violence removed the layers, something emerged which was richer and more interesting than anything I could have contrived to put there.” Her intuitive paintings reflect “waking dreams” — haunting, achingly familiar images evoking that which can be felt but never spoken.