North Bay-based artist Arlington Hoffman poses beside his work The End of the Line at the opening of his art show, titled Portraits, Figures and other Things, at the Alex Dufresne Gallery at the Callander Bay Heritage Museum on May 10.
CALLANDER – It’s a show a decade in the making.
North Bay-based artist Arlie Hoffman opened his new show, Portraits, Figures and Other Things, at the Alex Dufresne Gallery in the Callander Bay Heritage Museum on May 10.
The show features a wide collection of the retired health-care worker’s pieces. These includes his vivid portraits, biblical-themed photo transfers and pieces selected from the Angele Project, the celebrated 2006 exhibition that examined the life of Angele Egwuna, a native woman who had great influence over Canadian icon Grey Owl, among other things.
“It encapsulates what I’ve been doing the last 10 years of my life,” Hoffman said, adding that he refers to the new show as a “10-year perspective rather than a retrospective.”
The last 10 years have brought some changes and experiments in Hoffman’s work.
He said he worked a lot in oil early in his career, then put a long effort into mastering watercolour.
He’s now working in both mediums.
Hoffman also once concentrated mainly on landscapes.
“So many people do landscapes so well. There are many competent artists who tackled the subject and did an excellent job,” Hoffman said.
“I really didn’t do any figurative work,” he said, adding that in the last 10 years, he’s returned to it.
But Hoffman said that he wanted to tackle a new subject matter, so he began exploring figures as a subject matter.
Just because the subject is a new challenge for Hoffman, doesn’t mean it hasn’t been done before, he said. “It’s very hard to set yourself apart in everything,” he said.
Hoffman said he’s just trying hard to interpret subject matter in his own way.
You can check out Hoffman’s collection at the gallery until June 28. The Alex Dufresne Gallery is on 107 Landsdowne St. East in Callander.
Hoffman said he’s very pleased about his first solo showing at the gallery, which he said is a great forum for local artists to show their art, as well as to draw the public to the “wonderful” attached museum.
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