YOFFY

PEOPLEText: Reto Caduff

As a young artist, Los Angeles based Yoffy has already grasped the basics of making it in the fickle art business. With a short, one word name, Yoffy has already become a brand, a label that sticks to his sleek, minimalistic, graphic work. But then, no wonder, because Yoffy is from the iPod generation, who came (no surprise here) to L.A. via an internship at MTV in New York. Talk about a pop sensibility. Andy would be proud.

Yoffy is a native of Williamsburg, Virginia. He graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University with a bachelor of arts in communication arts and design. His academic career afforded extensive studies and training in illustration, graphic design, web design, film, animation, photography and color theory.

And color is the key throughout all his oeuvre. Even before moving to L.A., Yoffy actively painted throughout design school, centering on abstract paintings based on native American geometry methods. In the way of media, nothing was off limits, often applying his designs to old canvases, refrigerator doors, freezers, oil barrel lids and trash cans.

He has now moved to the classic canvas and his new series looks very graphic reduced on a screen – to really get the full experience, one has to stand in front of the large (sometimes 5×6 feet tall) images to get the details and perfection applied to these paintings. How does he do it? “I sketch my paintings digitally in Photoshop, then transfer it to a vector-based program called Illustrator. This allows me to get the super clean lines and adjust the color composition on the computer before I lay anything down on canvas. I think of the computer as a modern day sketch pad” he tells from his garage turned artist studio in Santa Monica.

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