Her gifted hands reach for small brushes—lots of them—when it’s time for rodeo painting.
Eliza Hoffman, now 18 and soon to graduate from Clear Springs High School, knows that to tell a story convincingly on canvas, working in oil, the little details make all the difference.
“Something about the figures and their faces that I wanted to capture was all of the colors that are bouncing off of their skin,” Ms. Hoffman, from League City, Texas, told The Epoch Times.
Her painting, titled “Warriors of the Great Spirits,” succeeded in winning not only the appreciation of the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo judges but also the title of Grand Champion Work of Art in the 2024 School Art contest. It then fetched $275,000 at auction.
It was “nerve-wracking” when the judges got to naming the top winners, proceeding from lowest placing to highest, announcing the top prize last, Ms. Hoffman said. “But hearing that I got the last one [the top prize], I felt really grateful because I knew that my painting was received well by the judges.”
Her painting of two Lakota warriors was then “off to the rodeo,” she said, speaking of the NRG Center where her work will be on display for a year.
The big challenge in composing her masterpiece was to tell a story of Native American culture, and “really understanding and getting to know my subjects,” said the artist, who was 17 at the time.
“I was able to attend Western artists’ photoshoots put on by the American Frontier Production, and they bring on cowboys, Native Americans, and different models,” she said. “So I was able to meet these two Lakota men and learn a little bit about the Lakota tribe.”
Accurately depicting details such as beadwork on the sleeves of the war shirts and feathers worn on their heads helped Ms. Hoffman channel the essence of the culture with fidelity, while allowing her to work on other areas of the canvas with more artistic license and freedom.
As Ms. Hoffman had claimed second place in the competition in 2023, garnering the Reserve Grand Champion Painting title, this year she pushed herself to step up her game.
Slotting in the 150 hours needed to finish the painting amid her busy school schedule, including eight AP subject classes, was no mean feat, but her hard work paid off. Yet, despite Ms. Hoffman’s ambition to claim the top spot, her efforts, nevertheless, flowed from a place of humility.
“Instead of thinking about, ‘I want to be the best, I want to be first place,’ I wanted to focus on just creating a painting that’s better than what I did last year,” she said. “This year, I wanted to try something a little more complex. Maybe, instead of one figure, like I did last year, I had two people in my painting.”
Seeing her daughter’s modest attitude, Eliza’s mother, Yoon Hoffman, is proud. Her own father, an artist himself, hails from North Korea and “had to endure so much,” the elder Ms. Hoffman told the newspaper.
“To be able to live in America and achieve the American Dream and to have a grandchild who was able to just really appreciate the fruits of, basically, their labor,“ the artist’s mom said, ”I feel as though—as long as she can stay humble, put her head down, be kind to people—I’m so proud of her.”
The young painter’s grandfather was a commercial artist when they still lived in California, working in the days when designers painted billboard signs for new movies about to hit the box office. And from the time the younger Ms. Hoffman was 3 years old, posing in front of a mirror as her own model to draw from, her grandfather knew where her talent lay.
Additional works by Eliza Hoffman:
