Christopher Martin Hoff – Seattle’s nothing

From Charles D’Ambrosio‘s Seattle, 1974, collected in Orphans, published by Clear Cut Press:

The Seattle of that time had a distinctly coma-like aspect and at night seemed to contain in its great sleepy volume precisely one of everything, one dog a-barking, one car a-cranking, one door a-slamming, etc., and then an extravagant, unnecessary amount of nothing. Beaucoup nothing. The kind of expansive, hardly differentiated, foggy and final nothing you imagine a coma induces. I read the silence as a kind of Nordic parsimony. An act of middle-class thrift. A soporific seeded into the clouds.

Christopher Martin Hoff paints the old Seattle alive in the new, what the town looked like before big money and business took hold in the 1980s, making the place famous for its opposite – hustle and innovation.

The Line
2010
Oil on Linen
30″ x 24″

Living in Seattle at the tail end of its coma, New York photographer Joseph Bartscherer paused midway as he crossed against a late-night light in Pioneer Square and gestured around him.

You’ve got cars in the streets, lights in the buildings and towels in the bathrooms. Where are the people?

Here is the church, here is the steeple, open the doors and out
comes…nobody. The light in Hoff’s paintings hits the street like a reprieve from death. Not wanting to be disloyal to death, locals stay home with their shades drawn.

The Blanket
2010
Oil on Linen
28″ x 28″

There’s a tenderness to Hoff’s exactitude, bringing to mind Rackstraw Downes.

The Pulpit
2010
Oil on Linen
24″ x 22″

Even when Hoff’s scene is dry, his streets have the volume of the wet. The Doubloon, image below, has to refer to Captain Ahab’s promise to the first man who spots the white whale. That man will be entitled to pry the coin off the mast and keep it forever in his pocket, unspendable at the bottom of the sea.

The Doubloon
2010
Oil on Linen
20″ x 20″

I’ve been running Hoff’s images on my blog as long as I’ve had a blog. (Hey! Look at this!) But you can’t see their most distinctive qualities in reproduction, their quake and swell, their home-chord of silence, of light making a temporary appearance after a long season of gray.

Aside from other artists, few people know Hoff, even in Seattle. Modest with old-world manners, he avoids the necessity of using them, keeping to himself as he paints on the street instead of from photos in his studio.  For what it is and what it is building into, his work is insanely undervalued.

Through May 29 at the Linda Hodges Gallery.