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Aaron Keith Hoffer

Dover

Emerging
Visual Arts: Painting

By: Gail Obenreder

“My work documents a search for visual novelty through an application of incongruent materials, techniques, and color schemes.”

In making his iconoclastic and highly intricate artworks, Aaron Keith Hoffer works backwards. Where many artists begin with sketches or studies, he begins with “cacophonous overstimulation, allowing subjects to emerge.” As they do, he begins to “cross the spectrum from spontaneous to exacting,” cultivating the images that emerge from those purposefully “chaotic abstract beginnings.”

As a child, Hoffer’s two main interests were “the visual language of comic books” and a love of music. The line work of those comic books and cartoons fostered his obsession with pencil drawing, and that led him to study graphic design, the field that gained him admission to the University of Delaware. But Hoffer was “smitten with my experiences in the fine arts there and switched to pursue a BFA in painting.”

He abandoned his artistic practice for a while after graduation, but he returned to painting, “digging out my materials and some old works to paint over, creating not for an audience, but strictly for its therapeutic benefits.”

As he worked, inundating the canvas with “as many academic visual ‘faux pas’ as possible,” Hoffer found that balance and harmony began to emerge, along with “pockets of expressionism verging on representational realism.” The series for which he was awarded a Division fellowship began “without any formal representation or narrative,” but as viewers began to point out forms that appeared in his work, “I began to seek these spontaneous subjects out.”

His other early interest – music of all genres and styles – has developed in parallel with his maturing visual arts. As he began to “devote attention to the sonic arts,” Hoffer realized that the “experimental sonic abstractions” of avant-garde musicians like Devo, Brian Eno, Boredoms, and Hanatarash seemed to “correspond spiritually to artists like Salvador Dali, Yoko Ono, and Jackson Pollock,” bridging the two “worlds” that continue to inspire him.

The artist is also “an avid fan and creator of ‘noise,’ an experimental genre where almost anything can be used in its creation.” And, an avid reader, he has recently begun to incorporate philosophical, political, and historical texts as inspirations for his painting.

Hoffer has lived in Delaware his entire life, dividing his childhood between Dover (with his mother) and Camden (with his father). Now, the artist and his family (a wife and two children) live in Little Creek, just four miles from his childhood home. The pandemic “radically altered my perception of self and place,” but he did discover that “the increased isolation led to massive bursts of artistic productivity.”

In his practice, Hoffer has “prided myself in making the most of whatever materials are at hand” – yielding some of his most novel techniques – but “the Fellowship will allow me to plan and prepare for vastly more expansive avenues” like electronic file storage and replacement or acquisition of new equipment. “Beyond grateful” for these opportunities, Hoffer is “absolutely willing to do all that is required . . . to fulfill and make the very best of this Fellowship . . . an incredibly constructive and life-affirming service.”

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