Artist Statement

Hadley Hoffman is a 23-year-old artist who received a lovely, yet a-typical upbringing in one of the largest cities in the world, New York. Her experience exposed her to the best and worst of what communities and individuals can offer. Her work aims to mentally rectify this polarity of personality. Hadley is drawn to the world-building that can be held in a single piece in its entirety. The play and dread that can beautifully co-exist, and in most cases, depend on each other to produce the beauty and fun. A focus on color, imagery, and line are used to generate a comprehensively encompassing environment.

Illustrations by Shel Silverstein, Dr. Seuss, May Gibbs, and Quintin Blake, are some of Hadley’s biggest inspirations. With a less traditional approach to illustrations targeted towards children, they embrace literary worlds of absurdity that achieve a symbiosis of childhood play and anxiety. Authors for children that do not shy away from heavy topics for children, rather reconstruct them in a palatable manner.

Outside of illustration, inspiration comes from artists such as Giorgio Morandi and Bosch. She studies the application of paint by Giorgio Morandi which enables him to make endless permutations from the same objects, all with different breaths of life. Like Bosch, Hadley loves the strange playful feeling nestled into reality, but is unwilling to remove the work of the hand. Hadley does not consider her work to fall into the realm of surrealism, but, rather, considers it absurdist.