Marlee Hoffman and Van Gogh

Here’s Marlee Hoffman

Had a chat with Marlee as she sat at the gallery desk the other day.

(Whenever the gallery’s open, you’ll find at least one member artist sitting there.
And a standing invitation to chat about art!)

We talked about her painting of the asylum at St. Remy where Van Gogh stayed and the beautiful clear intense light ot the area that she made the subject of her painting.


Van Gogh loved the light . Its brilliance fired the colors of his paintings and was the reason (as I recall) he wanted to start an artist’s colony there (with Gauguin as the first member).

Marlee’s light wanders through her painting mostly as unpainted paper and as delicate washes depicting the vines reflecting the light. Her exquisite realistic style and her technique were developed in France on a workshop with the painter G. A. Schellar who took her group to a number of sites in Provence such as Arles and Aix-en-Provence important to painters.

Marlee tells the story of how she converted gradeschool kids in northern Michigan (Alcona) to be arts enthusiasts by taking on the persona of Van Gogh. She was the “picture person” which meant she tacked up art posters and talked about art with the kids. When she talked about Van Gogh, she looked like him - complete with candle on broad brimmed straw hat and bandaged ear - a never-to-be-forgotten image for sure.

Marlee says she is still thinking about light and reflections in her current work with red ceramic bowls that have extremely bright reflections. You can see them in the gallery now. (Incidentally, someone mentioned as I was looking at themyesterday that Marlee places a tiny cross in her paintings - see if you can find it, it’s less that a quarter inch high.) These bowls present bold circular shapes that fill the picture plane and energetically move the viewing eye through it.

Dutch painter Marlene Dumas was our next topic of converstion. She was written about in the NYTimes Magazine June 15 because she has a show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles that travels to MOMA in December. Her watercolor portraits (as seen in the Phaidon monograph I have of her) are painted on a very wet ground