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Oklahoma City FRIDAY, Friday, July 3, 2015, Page 22
hometown most powerful
Hoffman paints love for his city through community service [Continued from Page A-22]
entranced by the beauty, the colors, the majesty of the painting, titled Self-Portrait in a Top Hat. The deeper he delved into Chetkov’s work, the more it absorbed him. He was slowly losing himself to the work of a man he had never met, and it was fantastic. His love of art is ubiquitous, seeping into the other areas of his life. As the mayor of Nichols Hills, he looks at the city in a very unique way. “I basically see the city as a painting,” Hoffman said. “As I am an art collector and have been involved in art my whole life and see the world as art. [I] see virtually everything as art from actual paintings and sculpture to parks to relationships to companies to all forms of life. I’ve seen Nichols Hills as this great canvas that already had beautiful brushwork on it, but could be even more beautiful than it was. So, I wanted to help be one of the artists to paint the painting.” It is Hoffman’s goal to continue to improve the city of Nichols Hills, while also maintaining its bucolic nature. There’s something peaceful about the city, driving through the neighborhoods and admiring the lush green lawns with the lines indicating a recent trim still
visible. Or watching kids play in one of the well-kept parks. It’s something that Hoffman doesn’t want to let escape him. He draws his love for art and community from his mother, but much of Hoffman’s qualities are drawn from his father as well. A city councilman himself, the late Peter Hoffman Sr. demonstrated to his son the value of having a voice and impacting the community through development. “Growing up, I remember him working to help this community even as it was just evolving,” Hoffman said. “I had a lot of examples from both parents of community involvement helping add value to your world. I saw that firsthand virtually my whole life and it had a big impact on me.” Even as Hoffman grew up and moved out, he never lost his sense for adventure. After graduating from Southern Methodist University, he attended Thunderbird School of Global Management in Glendale, Arizona. When he was 21, he studied abroad in Paris, living on a boat in the Seine River. One day, he and two friends conceived what might be described as a crazy idea. They wanted to sail to Africa, but without the motor or the radio.
“I had a lot of examples from both parents of community involvement helping add value to your world. I saw that firsthand virtually my whole life and it had a big impact on me.” --Mayor Peter Hoffman “We wanted to be like the ancient mariners,” Hoffman said. “Can you imagine how idiotic that was?” Among Hoffman and his friends, there was one experienced sailor. The plan was to use the lighthouses’ beams, each of which had a different light frequency, to stay on the right path. It would have worked, if not for the atypical wind pattern, Hoffman said. “We hit a freak storm one day out of England,” he said. “We hit an easterly storm blowing west, rare in the summer. It blew for 40 straight hours with virtually 20-25 foot seas. Howling black, screaming wind, foaming seas, and our boat, with no radio, no nothing – you couldn’t even tack in to get in shore – there was nothing we could do but ride it out. This boat had a tiller. It was so old, it didn’t even have a wheel.” Hoffman and his friends took turns in the cockpit toiling with the tiller, trying to no
avail to get the boat to concede to their command. The two that had the luxury of rest usually spent it below, try to sleep away the time until all of this was over. “All you could stand of the concentration [of steering the boat] was 2-3 hours at a time,” Hoffman said. “This 50-foot boat was virtually a surfboard on these waves blowing to New York. It blew for almost two solid days. You had to watch every one because if it spun around and the next one crashed over you, that’d be all she wrote.” Finally, the storm came to a halt. “Then, as crazy and wild as the ocean was at that moment, it started getting calm,” he said. “Completely, glass calm. Now we’re 150 miles west of France, the ocean is slicker than Lake Hefner on a calm morning, and it’s this purple-blue ink and you can’t see anything. Suddenly, this fog comes up. Gigantic, dense pea-soup thick fog, and then we hear this clank! Clank! Clank! Which means a freighter is coming. Normally you see them, but now with this dense fog, we could not see a thing. [If] a freighter hits our little wooden boat, it’d be like running over a twig. So we’re thinking ‘This is it. We’re about to get smoked by some giant freighter and they’re not even going to know they hit us.’ We suddenly see this light go by and we can tell what side we’re on. This giant black haul moves close by us and then leaves. They never knew we were even there and they went so close to us.”
After all that, one would think Hoffman and his friends might be able to afford some good luck. As they sailed to Portugal, it appeared that might be the case. But soon, another storm would come. Though this storm was not as violent as the first one –with only eight foot waves – it would be the last straw for their tiny wooden boat. Unbeknownst to Hoffman, the boat had rotted plank. Though it was able to withstand the first beating, this one proved too much for it to handle. The boat sank, and they had to paddle to shore on a raft. That was the end of that adventure. But Hoffman has so many more. He used to like to get out in the wilderness with his brother, Kent, each September when they were a little bit younger. The two would explore for a week going hiking, fly-fishing and just trying to survive on the basics. “Sometimes we would go literally a week without seeing another human,” he said. “We have always loved getting out into nature where you truly get into nature without seeing a lot of humanity so that you experience it in its natural habitat. There is something wonderfully aweinspiring that occurs when you go out into the powerful wilderness with just your own wits and a few things and live within the land. It’s a very humbling and powerful experience.” It’s why he is founding partner and chairman of the board of Wilderness Matters, an organization dedicated to helping everyone enjoy the outdoors, with an emphasis on those with disabilities. An active volunteer, Hoffman has plenty to keep himself busy. He is on the Board of Directors for the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum, and says that he enjoys seeing how Western culture has evolved in the modern
era. He is a selfdescribed “avid athlete” and teaches a spin class six days a week at PACER Fitness and the Oklahoma City Golf and Country Club. “It’s a way to get great exercise in a concentrated period of time with good people, great music and suffering like a dog,” he said. “You have the high of after-work out endorphins, so you get it all, basically.” Hoffman is continually painting, without ever having picked up a brush. His artwork happens in the development of a city, as he adds new and exciting pieces to the puzzle. A touch of color here, a touch of color there. “My paintings occur in the living world,” he said. “Whether they be companies or with people or with our community, I seem to enjoy painting in a way that feels like a painting to me when I look at one but in my sense it’s more of a dynamic living world of our daily life.” Each brushstroke added to the painting that is Nichols Hills brings him more and more happiness. But he knows that he will never be able to complete the masterpiece. “This [painting] is a dynamic, ongoing, living being,” he said. “Just as we are always working on ourselves, [Nichols Hills] will always lend itself to new touches, new brushstrokes by those that follow and by those that are here to help make it better and better.” Above all else, Hoffman’s devotion to this painting comes from a love of the city that he has resided in since the 1950s. He strives every day to make it a painting vivid, lively and colorful, reminiscent of the work of Boris Chetkov. “I love Nichols Hills and I love spending my life trying to make it better,” he said. “Nichols Hills is a treasure. It needs to be honored and nurtured and loved in order to help it be the greatest masterpiece it can be.”