The Art Portfolio of Deirdre Hofer
Deirdre Hofer is a Vancouver-based artist who uses ice cream as a motif throughout her portfolio. The artist’s practice varies in terms of media and subject matter, but maintains a visual consistency that helps guide the viewer toward the bigger ideas therein.
I quite enjoy Deirdre’s recent series Falling Snow. This series of oil paintings takes advantage of a high-contrast visual design, layering pale, rounded marks over black backgrounds to create the appearance of fat snowflakes falling in front of some unseen light source. It’s really interesting to see how the artist brings colour into these works -- each “snowflake” is composed of layers of pale pigment, resolving into white at the centre, giving the illusion of volume and some reflective quality.
The artist also employs interesting contrast between background and foreground in other series, like The Bullfinch Guide, in which painted ice cream cones are layered over pages of text. The dense information contained in the background of the works encourages a closer look at the finer details.
