Chickadees by Joan HoffmanOn Tuesday January 28, at 7 PM, Joan Hoffman, artist and naturalist, will present The Art of Birding at the downtown Chaffee Art Gallery, 75 Merchants Row, Rutland. Narrating a slide show of her oil and watercolor paintings, she will highlight the connections between nature, birds and culture. She paints birds in their habitats, but unlike Audubon, the renowned 19th century bird artist, she paints them as she momentarily sees them in nature. Ms. Hoffman will also show David O. Brown’s Cornell Lab video on the reintroduction of the Atlantic Puffin on Eastern Egg Rock Island in Maine.
Joan Hoffman’s impressionistic plein air paintings reflect her adventures in remote and wild landscapes. She is integrally connected to the land by teaching, painting and preserving the wild places that she explores. She has through-hiked the Colorado Trail; body floated the Barranco del Cobre (Grand Canyon) of Mexico and rafted numerous rivers in the American West. This past summer, while on an “Art of Birding” fellowship at Audubon’s Hog Island Camp in Maine, she worked alongside other nationally recognized artists and naturalists such as Atlantic Puffin expert Steve Kress, bird artist and author Julie Zickefoose, and author Scott Weidensaul. In September, she was invited to present The Art of Birding to the Colorado Crane Conservation Coalition Sandhill Crane Festival in Steamboat Springs, Colorado.
As a tireless advocate for understanding habitats and wilderness, she lectures and writes on the history of American landscape painting, national parks and public lands and has been artist in residence at Yosemite. She hosts painting retreats in Utah, Colorado and the Sierras and teaches at the Point Reyes National Seashore Field Institute in California.
Her books and paintings can be viewed, respectively, at Amazonkindle/joanhoffman and www.joanhoffman.com. To follow her blog, click here.
This will be an enjoyable, inspiring presentation for artists, birders and nature lovers alike. The Rutland County Audubon Society and the Chaffee Art Center are co-sponsoring this event. For information call Renee Warren, Rutland County Audubon Program Chair at 802-747-4466.