Tom Hoffmann's New Book on Watercolor Painting - Iskra Fine Art

By A Mystery Man Writer

Last updated 17 Jun 2024

Tom Hoffmann's New Book on Watercolor Painting - Iskra Fine Art

I was thrilled today to receive my copy of Tom Hoffmann's new book on watercolor, "Watercolor Painting: A Comprehensive Approach to Mastering the Medium," just out from Watson Guptill. You may know Hoffmann as a painter of incandescent skies and inimitable backstreets, an artist who takes "the unpaintable" and transforms it-- he can make the most ordinary extraordinary. Over the course of his career his work has moved through many phases, but always it holds an indelible signature. His paintings are about paint and how it wants to be, combined with wonderful leaps of reduction and abstraction. His best work captures the air and the time of "place", with a haunting sense of both immediacy and reverie. This new book provides a valuable and fresh approach to understanding the medium. It's a big picture view that will fill in what is missing from the volumes that teach you how to render kitten fur or use frisket to paint birch trees in the snow. (Not that these techniques aren't valuable for any painter's repertoire) I am happy to be included in the book with a study for "From One Tree."