This year The Long Walkers honored the memory of two Long Walkers who passed away: Jenny Voncks, mountain climber, bicyclist, and Seal Sitter, who, after a battle with brain caner, died on December 24, 2010 and Christopher Hoff, Seattle’s renown plein aire painter, who died unexpectedly this past spring.
On the last morning of The Walk we planted a Sugar Maple at Told MacDonald Park in their memory. I asked each participant to write on slips of paper what they would like to see grow for themselves in the coming year and we placed them in the hole.
Beth Sellars, Long Walker veteran and curator at Suyama Space will also be honoring Christopher with a major exhibition of his work.
Open free to the public, Friday, August 31, 1 – 9 p.m.
Fisher Pavilion, the newly dedicated to visual art space in the center of Seattle Center. The exhibition will open free to the public on Friday, August 31 at 1 p.m. after the Mayor’s Arts Awards Ceremony that occurs at 12 noon on the northwest corner of the Fountain Lawn. The exhibition will remain open all day; a reception for friends and collectors of Christopher Hoff is scheduled that evening, 6 – 8 p.m. in the Christopher Martin Hoff Remembered exhibition space.
Artist statement: My daily practice as an urban plein-air painter is the means by which I uncover meaning in the world around me. For the past fifteen years my work has explored the poetic stillness of the mundane through the lens of observational painting.
Working on location, sometimes for more than a year at a single site, my brush both documents and revises with each passing day. Paying witness to this change, translating the cyclical ebb and flow of nature, culture, and commerce into paint compels me to go back outside each day. My intention is not to create something removed from experience, but rather to weave the shared experiences of hundreds of these moments back into one resonant and handmade surface.