EMOTIONAL REALISM:

Maple Brook Studio is open year-round by appointment: call or text 860-916-4232 to set a time to visit.

Hoffman is a versatile artist exploring a variety of media during her life-long career as an artist.  

She grew up in Manhattan and on Long Island, taking every art course available throughout her public schooling. After graduating from NYU with an art education degree, she taught fine arts in one of NYC's junior high schools for three years.  She moved to the Sonoma Valley in California in the early 1970s, living on a commune in Glenn Ellen where she became the cook. 

She returned to the East Coast after a six-week journey across the United States in her 1962 Ford Econoline Van. After learning about art therapy, she moved to CT to earn a Master's Degree in Counseling Psychology and was hired as the director of art therapy at a private psychiatric institute.  Toward the end of her tenure there she discovered she couldn't be an artist and an art therapist at the same time. Her next career, from which she retired in 2006, was as a middle school counselor. There she met her husband, a 7th-grade science teacher.

She lives in the house her husband grew up in, and her studio is what had been built onto the 1880 house as an in-law apartment.

Her studio is open all year round by appointment. Here you can see a great variety of works by the artist: pen & ink, stone, and metal sculptures, Chinese brush paintings, her birch series on textured papers, pyrography, gourd art...