by Andrew Hofmeister
My parents brought me to eastern Montana (Ingomar) when I was a yearling (1914) to a 320-acre homestead of gumbo land. All my formative years were spent there. As a child I played in the creeks, walked the hills, climbed the nearby sandstone formations and searched for fossils in the banks and outcroppings. When I was needed, the call for my dog revealed my whereabouts.
I became addicted to music and art. I cannot recall a time in my life when I did not work on my drawing and painting. The isolation afforded the quiet hours I savored. I went to school and took employment to further my education and later to feed my family, but I never had any thought other than to be an artist, and all my energies have been in that direction.
Observing the topography, scanning the creek banks, and finding arrowheads and fossils stimulated my imagination. My father seldom asked me to ride for our livestock on the open range that surrounded us because he knew I kept my eyes on the ground for arrowheads and fossils instead.
I also found markings on sandstone cliffs that told me life had come and gone more recently on those premises. There I saw rattlesnakes, horntoads, jackrabbits, sage hens, and prairie dogs, antelope, coyotes, sheep, cattle, and horses. I heard the symphonies of larks, prairie buntings, killdeer, curlews......
My brother and I found a buffalo skull on our land in 1923. I thought of my father being the first inhabitant to have plowed a furrow in that land. I saw life come and depart. I felt the sadness of these changes, but more that, I felt the urge to preserve these experiences in some abstract way. Painting became the answer.
There is much beauty in the textures, the colors, the forms, the sounds, the changes, the movements and the odors of this land.
Is there a way to create an entity that implicitly expresses and manifests all these qualities? I'm not sure but that is my goal. I want to share with others the beauty of the sadness in some concrete way without having the result be story-telling or illustrative.
The function of an artist, it seems to me, is to reveal to others something that would have gone by unnoticed if it had not been for his/her existence. That has become my desire.
I have observed this land all my life. I've had my Spring. I've had my Summer and my Autumn. After gathering firewood from the "timber" ridge, insulating the cave with more earth, and stacking feed for the livestock, my parents would say: "We are now well-prepared for Winter." And now, I feel I am prepared too.
I am no longer interested in recreating or recording those things that already exist. I want my paintings to be compositions that arouse new feelings and hold the spectator. Like musical compositions---only done with the elements of design, and with the technique used as a means to an end, not as an end in itself.
These are merely some of the obvious points I can write or talk about. The most important aspects of painting are those which cannot be discussed. They are those parts of the artist which determine the artist's painting personality.
Like closing one's eyes while in reverie, I work in a windowless studio. I hear the music of Mahler, Delius, Sibelius....
I never did put myself "up for adoption" by Montana; I am a part of her and she is a part of me. I now own that homestead in Rosebud County. It was not productive land for others, but it has been most productive for me in a very special way. I"m unable to scrape that gumbo from my boots.
TOMORROW'S WHITE: Alkali, bleached bones, fossil colors of yesterday's life.
HOME: A coming together--a myriad of shapes, and perhaps, implicit symbols of that place from where I came.
ABODES OF DEATH: Nothing specific--just a suggestion of quietness and tranquillity.
You are welcome to label the "untitled" works and to take with you whatever they have brought to you.