Born in 1945 to German-American parents in Baltimore, Maryland, Douglas Hofmann’s artistic interests were encouraged when he was very young. His father built and painted model trains, which they often worked on together; Hofmann credits this experience with teaching him the patience and attention to detail that he now uses every day as a Realist painter. With this background and his natural talent for drawing, Hofmann enrolled at the Maryland Institute College of Art in 1963, where he preferred to study the world of the Old Masters of realism, particularly the work of Jan Vermeer. It was at this point that he was introduced to the “Maroger” Method of painting, wherein artists study and attempt to reproduce the techniques and even the chemical makeup of the oil paints of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Hofmann’s artistic process is simple but interesting. First, he takes a photograph of his models, settings, and props. “Photography stops light,” he explains, “and is therefore the very best way to keep an image pure.” His photographs themselves are beautiful as he has a very good eye for composition, which he attributes to a job he held setting up window displays at a department store. “Learning how to collect the right props and arrange them in a display window is very similar to the work I do in planning and creating my paintings. This practical training was so much more useful than anything I could have learned in the staid atmosphere of art school.” His paintings are a result of this planning in combination with the spontaneous creative developments that occur during the following steps, when he sketches and blocks out the images and then, at last, when he has the paintbrushes in his hands. The results are breathtakingly beautiful and Hofmann’s original paintings and limited edition fine art prints have been collected across the United States and abroad.