Elizabeth Featherstone Hoff: reaching out and into people

American artist Elizabeth Featherstone Hoff

"I think artists are born and not made. How much ability they have, and what they are able to do with it varies depending on the rest of the personality and probably the early circumstances of their lives. Some with very little ability are able to forge huge ,successful careers, while others with tremendous ability can not move ahead at all."

"Thus it is that I have always been an artist . There were two seminal experiences in my early life that formalized this for me. When I was five years old, I had a little friend who lived down the street from me. Her mother was a professional pianist and teacher. There was a huge grand piano in their living room, and I vividly remember lying on my back underneath the piano and staring up at what I now know to have been a reproduction of Gauguin's painting FATATA TE MITI. His was the first invitation into the world I now inhabit."

"The second event took place several years later when I was looking through one of the many art reproduction books of my parents. I came across the painting by Siqueiros "Echo of a Scream" and was , as a child, terrified at the truth in it and pierced with the determination to try always to convey that truth."