Bert Green Fine Art

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Viva Hoffmann

My criminal lawyer father took me to Court in Syracuse, New York several times when I was around 5, 6 and 7 years old. At lunch in the Yates Hotel Tavern he'd hand me a yellow legal pad and pencil, telling the judges and lawyers, “watch this. She can get your likeness in about 10 minutes.” At Marymount College, now merged with Fordham University, I had two great teachers, Ozni Brown for painting and Ed Kelly for Art History. I spent Junior year in Paris partly at the Sorbonne and when I decided I didn’t know how to draw properly I went to either the Grand Chaumiere or the Academy Julien every day and applied myself to life drawing.

Back in NewYork in the 60s I spent some time at the Art Students' League, worked as a model, and acted in a couple of Warhol movies before being told by Paul Morrissey that painting was dead and anyway I was a "performing genius like Mick Jagger"; the irony that Andy himself was painting up a storm apparently not occurring to me. At a Tim Leary book signing party the Vice President of Putnam Brothers asked me to write a book so in Gore Vidal's spare bedroom in Rome I wrote the first couple of chapters of "Superstar." Meanwhile I'd acted in a few European films, gotten married, gave birth to Alexandra, and met Christopher Isherwood who told me anybody can write a first book, the trick is to write a second. Accordingly, I wrote "The Baby," published by Knopf, acted in a few more movies, obtained a divorce and had another baby, in that order. I put my children to work as actresses while I practiced journalism and then one day I bought some canvases and headed for Central Park, propping the stretcher against Gaby's stroller. I was unable to use her as ballast because she insisted on getting down on the grass and painting on the spare canvas so I had to buy an easel.

In 1998 up in the Thousand Islands where at 14, I’d persuaded my father to buy Swift Water Point, Steve Taylor, an architect I knew began buying my paintings. When his wife Nelly advised that I quit writing and paint full time, always eager to drop one thing and pick up another on the merest suggestion, I plunged ahead.