Art & Life with Diane Hoffman

Today we’d like to introduce you to Diane Hoffman.

Diane, please kick things off for us by telling us about yourself and your journey so far.
My tufted portraits celebrate the lives of local rescue animals and adoption narratives. By mixing disparate motifs and media, my art aims to reframe the use and meaning of animal bodies in our culture.

Trained as a figure painter, my human subjects’ textile rich environments were featured in my early paintings. As I copied vintage scarves and pastoral scenes on Toile de Jouy and Peacock chenille bedspreads, I became interested in the use of both animal imagery as well as animal print patterns. I studied how luxury brands used animals to symbolize pedigree, luxury, and colonial exoticism.  In all, most animal representation reveres landowners’ material wealth and displays its literal body or skin as a souvenir of foreign leisure.

Can you give our readers some background on your art?
My goal is to update the idea of the bucolic textile or animal pelt rug into something both joyful and critical. I aim to refocus representational ownership to explore adoption narratives and to confront the contradictory beliefs about animal bodies in our culture.

For the “Belly of the Beast” project, I create tufted paintings to produce low relief full body portraits of rescue animals sleeping on their backs. Tufting or looping yarn through a backing cloth is commonly used in carpet making. I use a combination of thousands of loop pile stitches at various heights and cut pile loops to create velvety lush or fuzzy textures ideal to describe fur and complex texture such as a brindle coat or tabby stripes. Through exaggerated color, rich texture and the animal pose itself, skin rug transforms into an interspecies interconnected meditation.

In your view, what is the biggest issue artists have to deal with?
The urge to make art and make money is often on opposite tracks. I want to make exquisite, fragile and complicated things. It takes an extraordinary amount of time to design, source, create, produce and sell any product. My challenge is to find the right customer. The joy of creating can be consumed by craft and business. It is essential to remember the spark that makes you passionate about creating and use it to drive you forward.

What’s the best way for someone to check out your work and provide support?
This fall, my work will be shown in three venues:

November 7- December 7 Wurks’ Gallery
“Lagniappe: Unsuspected Delight” The Wurks Gallery, 45 Acorn St, Providence, RI 02903

November 1 – December 2, 2018 “Geometry in Conversation” a show of quilts & other coverings from 159 Sutton St Carriage House, Providence, RI.

Dec. 9, 2017 to Dec. 10, 2017 at 10am – 4 PM
The Craft and Kitsch Winter Market at Pawtucket Arts Collaborative
560 Mineral Spring Ave., Pawtucket, Rhode Island 02860

Say Hello! and Follow me!
Instagram: https://instagram.com/dinohoffman
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DianeHoffmanTextiles/

Collaborate or Start a custom order:
There is a very modern component to my animal-focused textiles. I crowdsource other people’s pet photos in my designs. It’s hard to get photos of cats, so their owners have better luck getting the images I want!

dinodianehoffman@gmail.com
• To start a custom order:
Find all the pictures of your pet:
1. Set up a folder in Google drive, put all your photos in it. Best photos are focused a larger than 2 mg.
2. Share your folder with dinodianehoffman@gmail.com.

Contact Info:

• Address: Etsy: https://www.etsy.com/shop/dianehoffman
• Website: http://dianehoffman.net
• Phone: 1 401 270 7623
• Email: dinodianehoffman@gmail.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dinohoffman/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DianeHoffmanTextiles/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/Dinohoffman21

Image Credit:
Diane Hoffman

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