CHARLOTTE HOFFMAN Rotary has selected a pastel by Charlotte Hoffman as the featured piece of art depicting our Sierra Foothills. Rotary talked with her about how the foothills have inspired her art and participants can talk with her on June 11 at the Rotary Fine Art and Wine Festival.

Rotary asked Hoffman about her early years, and she responded. “I grew up as an Air Force brat living all over the world. My parents were from the San Joaquin Valley. My mother compared every country we lived in to California. She missed her Sierra Nevada range, the rolling foothills and the agriculture of the valley. We moved every few years or so, so I didn’t have a landscape to identify as being my own.”

How and when did you know you had a passion for the arts? “When our family settled in my parents’ hometown, I felt like a fish out of water. This wasn’t ‘my home’. That began to change in college when I began painting the landscape. Everyone advises that you should ‘paint what you know’, so I painted the landscape with which I’d grown familiar and, in turn, learned to love ‘my home’. Unless you’ve spent your formative years moving, unattached, you have no idea what it’s like to not belong anywhere.”

Hoffman continued, “Painting the landscape made me take a deeper look at the scenery and contemplate my place in this world. The painting chosen for the Mariposa Art and Wine Festival was painted in November 2010 on Trabucco Ranch during the first Sierra Foothill Conservancy Plein Air Open House Event. I was drawn to the classic scene of the foothills with oak trees casting their late afternoon shadows and the colors of the land during this season. My paintings reflect my emotional reactions to the land. We are lucky to have an abundance of undeveloped land to view in this area. I see beautiful vignettes of trees, rolling foothills, the snow capped Sierra Nevada and my mind spins with all the possible paintings.”

Everyone is invited to join Hoffman and many other artists at the Rotary Fine Art and Wine Festival. To apply to present artwork at the event, contact Marilyn Saunders at gave87670@mypacks.net or call 742-5134. Applications to participate are also available on the Web site at http:// www.mari- posarotary.org.