Artist’s Statement – Stephan Hoffpauir

My photorealist watercolor paintings do not depict well-known monuments and cityscapes but rather examples of vernacular architecture — the unremarkable buildings and spaces, which constitute the physical manifestations of a city’s everyday life. Though unrecognizable to outsiders, they are likely to be iconic images to locals, even if the viewer may not be able to identify the specific buildings or places being portrayed.

I am as drawn to the overlooked spaces around and between buildings as to the buildings themselves. The shiny, synthetic surfaces of the glass, painted metal and directional signs contrast with the older building surfaces surrounding them, providing a sense of continuity between past and present.

In addition to the first-generation photorealist artists of the 1960s and 1970s, my work has also been strongly influenced 19th century French Beaux Arts watercolor elevations — abstract two-dimensional architectural drawings in which only the vertical surfaces of a building’s exterior are represented, and depth is conveyed through the use of shadows. This has led me to often compose paintings as one-point perspectives in which walls become a series of overlapping two-dimensional geometric shapes, while other walls converge dramatically on a distant vanishing point, creating visual tension between these static planar elements.

I work from my own digital photographs, approaching the painting process in an objective, even clinical way, much like a 19th century botanical artist might if such photography had existed at the time. Each composition is first constructed from as many as four separate photographs, then carefully cropped, edited and manipulated with digital software. Each watercolor is painted by hand – using traditional methods, materials and tools – with three to six weeks required to complete a single work.

Stephan Hoffpauir

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