Scales of the Koi fish are cut out the fins and head is etched in relief. There are separate color sequences projected in the scales and on each separate section of the fishshape and outside

HoKoiSai

A mixed-medium portrait of local drag queen, Mexica Xadows, surrounded by dahlias, Mexico's national flower, which both depicts Mexica's pride in their Mexican culture, and to juxtapose the powerful pose and dress of Mexica. This is part of a series of portraits of local drag queens. 

Portrait of Mexica Xadows

Early spring inspired weaving. Neutral tones with a few highlights of yellow and red representing blooming trees. Some leaves and tree branches woven into the piece.

Homeschool 1

image of a crashed object, with surroundings and text

panel study

A brightly colored collage of an old golden yellow and orange armchair.

Armchair in Golden Orange Plaid

A watercolor painting of an imaginary island's topographical map as viewed from above, in shades of green, lavender, and brown created with sparkly genuine gemstone paints.

Gem Island

This collage consists of painted and printed papers with hand cut letters and various elements composed to create a colorful, interesting image.

big letters

A broken twig lay laterally from a view in the forked road and light flickers brightly and beyond the shack.

Tar Paper Shack

Blinded

A series of eighteen 4" x 6" plastic bags filled with randomly cut and altered sections of advertisements, solicitation mailings, or colorful marketing postcards and magazines arranged in a circle with the paper pieces in the bag along the outside and the clear zip-lock closure forming the inside of the circle. 

New Meaning #2

Glass mosaic of a raven with a shiny bauble in its beak. This piece is created with many tiny glass pieces of iridescent colors including purples, greens, blues and black.

Shiny

This is my self-portrait (my head and neck are visible). It is made in low relief with the image projecting slightly out towards the picture plane. It is very textural as I built the sculpture using handmade paper pulp from recycled paper. It is all white, with some areas of grey and off white. 

Self Portrait

An illustration of three woman in a forest huddled around a ritual knife. It is starting to snow. One of the women is looking at the viewer as if they are witnessing something they should not. The woman have long wild hair and the knife is dark with something. The art style is sketchy and painterly, an eerie, hazy red-black and yellow-green. 

Ladies of the Wood

An abstract encaustic work with an added Terra Cotta tile that echoes the colors and shapes in the encaustic.

Desert Lake

A collage of a woman wearing sunglasses and yellow tears surrounded by flowers and splotches of paint in a pop brightly colored pop culture style.

Psychedelic Tears

This collage  captures trees in the foreground and the suggestion of trees in the distance. It is dusk with a light blue tone in the sky and background and  a deeper blue grey tone in the trees. Behind and in front of the trees there is a gentle glow of fireflies. Some in the foreground, but most filling the background becoming smaller in the distance. There is a darker gold center to the flash and a softer glow emitting around it. There is texture on the surface from paper overlays.


Fireflies

Orange, yellow and red stained and layered glass form the background and represent dangers of climate change (earth on fire/flooding due to polar melting). Paper mache' figures of Peruvian masked dancers with instruments (drum and accordion) sing the warning cry.  A blue and red fused glass disc represents earth flooded while the "sky" is the color most recently viewed during the West Coast wild fires.

Climate's Clarion Call

A collage of a fist clenching dark "revolutionary" female swooping into a gold acrylic swirl of paint.

Revolutionary

A mixed media collage on wood panel. Reddish/orange sky with a cut out image of a large looming rocky, textural mountain. In the center of the mountain is a golden yellow doorway or portal. 

Under the Mountain

A red painting in a black frame, a girl with yellow hair with broken legs, in a blue dress holding a red flower. 

Red canvas rectangle printed with a white hosta leaf that is angled from the top left and navy blue vertical lines attached to a black canvas with an overlay of black tulle stitched onto the burlap with 5 stitches of heavy blue thread and extending onto the black canvas.

Hosta 2

A cerulean blue collage with celestial images, swirling gold glitter, cut-outs of Egyptian papyrus art, and a peacock feather. 

The Lovers, The Dreamers, and Me

A white four by six inch rectangle on a black felt background. The rectangle shows an ink stamped typewriter, colored green, a grawlix on the page rolling out of the top.  To the right of the typewriter are two typewritten lines.  The top line says It was the best of times, crossed out in red, the bottom line says it was the worst of times.

Assessment: 2020 As A Postcard

A photo/oil paint collage consisting of multiple photos taken over time and re-composed into an abstract composition. 

Mill City Industrial 

A screen printed image of a skull placed on top of acrylic paint. The skull appears to be melting and dripping, its primary color is green mixed with blue, outlined in orange and dark navy. The acrylic paint behind the skull are thick vertical brush strokes; black, yellow, teal, lime green, pink, magenta, royal blue, black. 

SMPTE Skull

An altered book opened to reveal a lighted lamppost on a hill of snow beyond miniature pines and a section of wardrobe.

Spare Oom Secret

Multi-colored tree top with a chartreuse leg/trunk angled toward the lower left on a blue background

Tree Pose

Abstract arrangement of objects layered in an organic impasto composition.

Composition 3

Raisin From My Winter Coat Pocket, November 2019

I approach the collage as a painting not a mere assembly of pictures.  As I collect materials, they seem to connect individually or in groups. I begin to see the materials interact as I arrange colors and shapes, and discovering the form and the space created between them. Each added element will build on the previous one by changing, adding, or even result in eliminating the other components which many times were the original motivating pieces. You must allow the work to evolve and transform until the work seems to emerge from the complex contradictions or similitude, and multiplicity of the forms, edges, textures, shapes, space and even unrelated content. 

HoKoiSai, 2020

Stephen Hoffer