Joni Hoffman

Joni Hoffman was born in 1957 in Greenbelt, Maryland. After graduating high school, she became a certified legal secretary, a graduate of the Washington Business School. In the early 80s, she moved to San Diego, joined the United States Marine Corps, and went to Paris Island for Boot Camp. Afterwards, she went to Memphis to attend avionics school and then back to California for training on OV-10 Broncos and KC-130s. She settled at Camp Pendleton, MCAS To work avionics on the flight line of their OV-10 squadron.

After a training accident, and subsequent medical discharge, she went back to school and received her BS in accounting from Cal State San Marcos. During this time she married fellow Marine, Mike Hoffman, and they began a family in Fallbrook, California, “avocado capital of the world”. In the late 90s, the family moved to Cherry point MCAS, NC, where Joni was introduced to the art of decoy carving. Her hubby had attended a decoy festival on Harkers Island and, upon returning, he gushed about all he had seen claiming, “you can do this!” The local community college offered a decoy carving class and, after attending and joining the Harkers Island Decoy Guild, she honed her skills and began selling decoys at the annual Harkers Island Decoy Festival. Each year her decoys sold out to collectors up and down the eastern seaboard and, she won awards for her carving and painting of ducks and water birds.

After retiring from the Marine Corps in 2001, the family moved to Ocala, Florida, to settle permanently. In 2005, she joined the Keyhole Artists Co-op in Cedar Key, FL, and began selling her carvings and paintings on wood panels to visitors both domestic and international.

In 2015, she was introduced to a new art form called Zentangle, developed by founders Rick Roberts and Maria Thomas of Massachusetts. As Rick puts it, “tangles are created by deconstructing patterns into elemental strokes. You then re-create them by repeating those simple strokes in a structured way.… It yields a result that transcends its method.” And indeed, she did find this repetitive art form to be addicting as well as fulfilling. She threw herself into this detailed art form reimagining her love of nature and landscape producing fanciful but precise artworks. In 2015, her artwork “daybreak” was chosen for poster and T-shirt advertisement of the Old Florida Celebration of the Arts in Cedar Key, an annual event attended by over 10,000 people. In 2016, Joni traveled to Providence, RI to attend seminar #22 given by Rick Roberts and Maria Thomas and emerged as a newly minted CZT, or Certified Zentangle Teacher. She has produced and sold hundreds of Zentangle, and Zentangle inspired art pieces blending pattern and imagination together in ways she had never done before, developing serenity and equanimity along the way.