Drawing stick figures as a 5-year-old evolved over several decades into painting with acrylics to depict historical battlefield views.
Dan Hoffbauer, a native of southern California, moved to Northwest Arkansas about three years ago and is enjoying illustrating the history he's discovered here.
Hoffbauer, a real estate agent, says he likes history and art and has combined the two interests to paint scenes of the Battle of Pea Ridge and the Battle of Prairie Grove. His most recently finished artwork featured the Battle of Fayetteville and was presented to Headquarters House on Dickson Street, the home of the Washington County Historical Society.
"I hadn't painted in 35 years; I had artist's block," Hoffbauer says. "I came here ... I walked the Pea Ridge battlefield March 8 of last year. I wanted to see it in season. I'd been there before but only in the summer time.
"A week later, covid hit, so I said, 'You know what, I'm going to start painting again,'" he says, showing a small canvas he used for his return to art. One of his next projects was a scene from Prairie Grove battlefield. "This one's hanging in Hindman Hall."
Now that's he's finished the Battle of Fayetteville, he plans to illustrate the fight in Clemon's Field at the Battle of Pea Ridge.
"I've got a lot more Pea Ridge left in me. ... I'm trying to just specialize in local, Civil War stuff because I've always been a Civil War nut, student of it. Just being here and being able to physically go to a battlefield and to put myself in there and to the limits of my artistic ability, try to envision how it could have been."
"History kind of puts everything in context," he says, explaining that as people complain about today, he tells them to "transport themselves into Northwest Arkansas in 1862. ... Now, tell me how bad things really are today? We don't know how bad things are by comparison."
"My mother was an artist, and my sister, who lives in Rogers, is an artist, better than me -- although she uses a different genre," Hoffbauer says. Julene Smith does pet portraits in pastels, he says of his sister. But "our mother was the source of all our artist talent."
"When I was 5 years old I was drawing stick figures. I think maybe when I was 6 I had the epiphany to start filling them out a little bit," he says.
"Little by little I started with doing Civil War murals on shelf paper with colored pencils, then butcher paper and watercolor. I got into oils when I was a teenager. I finally switched to acrylics because oils are too dad-gum messy. I found that was a medium I liked, and that's what I stuck with," he says.
"I was always a Civil War and other history nut," he says, explaining his fascination with battle field paintings. He says before returning to painting, the last painting he completed -- a 4- by 6-feet image of the Battle of Waterloo -- was in 1984 and took two years. "I didn't have energy. I had artist's block for the longest time," he explains.
"Walking the battlefields here, participating in the experience of the place, kind of inspired me to start again," Hoffbauer says.
Hoffbauer has a journalism degree from the University of Southern California, owned a manufacturing company in California with his father for 30 years and then, when he was 57 years old, got into real estate..
"It gives me a lot of enjoyment to create something. What I'm trying to do is trying to visualize what it might have been like and then try to create that for somebody to look at and say 'Wow, this is a place I wouldn't want to be at!' To get a moment in time that could never have been created any other way except in the mind's eye. I'm trying to show what happened.
"The one I'm painting right now for the Battle of Prairie Grove," he says. "I researched this according to the histories. Then went on park, took pictures, tried to make it in such a way that you could go to that park and you could stand where the scene happened and kind of see it, to the best of my ability. I don't pretend to be the best artist in the world, but I have a passion for it."
"I've never produced at this level before, in terms of numbers of paintings. My sister used to tell me if you're going to be an artist, you have to produce whether you feel like it or not.
"Since I started painting, I've made a personal goal of three painting sessions, to take photographs of progress after I've done that session for the day. It could be anywhere from one to three hours.
"In one sense, the real estate discipline actually helped my artistic discipline. It's kind of like a serendipity kind of thing; maybe that's one reason I'm producing so much," he says.
Annette Beard is editor of the weekly newspaper The Pea Ridge Times. Email her at [email protected].
