The People Painter: Artist Katie Hohmann

“Mother and child” painting by Katie Hohmann.

Though Katie Hohmann has lived in Door County for 12 years, her art doesn’t always look the part.

“I did once paint a tugboat,” said the artist, who grew up in eastern Iowa.

Her focus is largely on people. 

“People moving, or their expressions, capture my time and my attention,” Hohmann said. 

Her subjects’ expressions are sometimes static, but not unemotional;  rather, they seem to be recovering from a stronger expression or about to break away from tranquility. Often, their expressions imply a secret, perhaps a remote feeling they aren’t sharing with the viewer.

Hohmann enjoys painting interactions between people, but when her subjects are alone, they often suggest an internal dialogue. In one painting, the subject is glancing to the side, with her right eye half-closed and her mouth holding the hint of a smirk.

These faces often belong to bodies depicted at unusual angles. One figure is seen from above, head resting on crossed arms and body stretched out below, and another rests her feet on the edge of a pool while her body floats beyond.

Working from models and photographs she takes herself, Hohmann paints large with 2-by-2-foot canvases or paper sheets, which she puts on the floor or against the wall as she works with oils, acrylics, charcoals, watercolors or colored pencils.

“With acrylics, I can play and work quickly,” Hohmann said. “I can respond to what I’ve just done using color and texture. Oils dry slower, so I blend pigment more, rather than layering. Oils tend to be a little more realistic, but still have an expressive quality.”

Many of her subjects are people she knows personally, friends and family members whose personalities and relationships with the artist influence how Hohmann depicts them. 

Children, some with their mothers, are the subjects of many of her recent works. When she exhibited at Pearl Wine Cottage in Ephraim last fall, she noticed just how many of her works revolved around parenthood, a subject she had focused on without noticing it.

“My sister is a mother and has two children, including a 3-year-old nephew who often shows up in my pieces,” Hohmann said. “A lot of people around me are currently having babies, and they have shown up in my work as well.”

In addition to The Pearl, Hohmann’s work has previously appeared at Northern Arts Collective. Now, it’s on view at Cultured, Shiny Moon Café and ARTicipation Studio and Gallery. 

Hohmann started showing her work locally around nine years ago, but her interest in art started well before that. Her grandmother is a painter, influenced by the style of Bob Ross, and Hohmann’s early exposure to art got her hooked. By the time she was a freshman in high school, she had decided to pursue it as a career.

Now, she’s doing just that, both during her day job – she works at the Peninsula Pulse as a graphic designer – and after it. Hohmann also does portrait and graphic-design commissions (the latter of which are easier because making modifications with paint is more of a challenge than doing so digitally.)

When working on commissions, Hohmann aims for her subjects to be recognizable. In her other work, there’s more room for interpretation. Hohmann loves when people find meaning in her art she hadn’t intended when creating it.

One example of that happened when Hohmann sold a piece at Shiny Moon Café. The painting depicted her cousin as a child, and it was washed with blue and yellow watercolors. Hohmann made it years before the Russo-Ukrainian War, but it reminded the buyer of Ukraine.

“People develop in their brains a story of what they are looking at,” Hohmann said. “Their story can be drastically different from what I have painted or what my intention was. That’s what I really love: people making up their own stories.”