Janine Hoffman Art pop art sports art illustraton celebrity portraits 

Born and raised in New York, Bradenton artist Janine Hoffman earned a bachelor of fine arts degree from Long Island University at C.W. Post. Her training was as a painter, but her first love has always been drawing, she related.

 

“When I was young, I used to spend hours drawing all sorts of things – dinosaurs, super heroes, monsters. But most of all, I would draw athletes. I loved sports. I loved to play baseball, football, hockey and basketball with my brother,” the artist recounts. During college, she had to put her love for these things on hold, pushing forward with figurative work on her own.

 

“Colored pencil is a medium I never formally studied, but I instinctively grew to love it,” she continued. “It suits my illustrative tendencies and helps me capture the essence of what I see. I can build, almost sculpturally, the faces and muscles in a way that painting can’t achieve,” she observed. “I was very inspired by the work of Michelangelo; his paintings were very much like that, and my sports art carrys with it the legacy of classical Greek art, finding glory in depicting what was the most beautiful and perfect in creation – the human form honed by an athlete. It is what I hope my art is: strength, beauty and grace,” added Hoffman.

 

With the prodding of a fellow artist, Janine decided to challenge herself and take on the world of digital painting into a new form of Pop Art. “In a way, digital art combines both. The digital paintings are all created on a computer with an electronic pen and tablet. I’m comfortable working digitally, but it requires a very different skill set than putting pencil to paper, so it took a bit of time to develop it,” the artist said.

 

“My Pop Art is an intentional move away from the almost Baroque detail in my pencil work to a very minimal amount of detail,” she continued. “That was major challenge for me. I am trying to capture the essence of a person with three main elements: eyes, mouth and hair.”

 

Her new digital art is inspired by her work as a comic book illustrator, which she began after graduation. She is also influenced by her love of Manga (Japanese comics) and represents "an ode to Warhol and Lichtenstein," she noted.

 

Janine’s work has been exhibited and sold widely in the USA, and it can viewed at the Tom James/Raymond James Financial Art Collection in Clearwater, Florida.

 

Her drawings have appeared in various publications, including Beckett monthly and independent comics, as well as her self-published “Steele Destinies.” She was an adjunct instructor at Ringling College of Art for 20 years.