Achieving mastery:
interrelationships on canvas and in community create wider and deeper circles, locally and internationally, engaging place, politics, and paint to generate meaning and belonging. |
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Film One: Alone in the studio deep into the night, James Gahagan (1927–1999), former Associate Director of the Hofmann school, pushed the limits of vision, invoking nuances of his environments to create transcendence. Engagement was key: translating the visual meanings of Hofmann's famous critiques, mobilising artists to legalize NYC loft living. His move north would transform the isolation of Vermont. | |
Colour Creates Light: A Diaspora in Four Films | ![]() Film Two: Canadian master colourist Joseph Frances Plaskett (1918–2014), a representational rebel who introduced half of Toronto’s Painters Eleven to Hofmann and to each other, sidestepped the abstract era to spend fifty years in Paris and his last sixteen in the UK, promoting internationalism in the arts and exploring how Hofmann’s teachings relate to realism. | |
The teaching in the atelier of Hans Hofmann (1880–1966), permutated through an international diaspora of
three of his alumnae, offers a conduit into the heart of the visual creative process.
Our individual and collective survival depend on creative thought.
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![]() Film Three: | |
![]() Film Four: Hofmann’s students could, and did, work in any style or medium they chose. Six master artists find diverse paths through the labyrinth of his teaching in a film shot across the US, the UK, and France. Diving deeply into the inner working of the visual language and backed by a chorus of their peers, they reveal a thought–scape of perennial considerations that might otherwise be lost. |