Brian Hoover

Brian Hoover is a painter, printmaker and musician in Cedar City, Utah where he is a professor of Painting and Printmaking at Southern Utah University.

Brian was born in Hershey, Pennsylvania. He received his initial training in art at the Cleveland Institute of art and then received a BFA at Kutztown University in Kutztown, PA. He went on to earn a MFA at the State University of New York at Buffalo.
His work is often described as surreal, but he associates himself more with the European Symbolists working in the latter part of the 19th century.

Brian has exhibited his work both nationally and internationally and is part of many private and public collections.

“The imagery in my work revolves around dreams, myth and spirituality.

For several years now, I’ve been very regimental about keeping a dream diary by my bed. Just scribbling a few notes when you wake in the night is crucial for remembering a dream the following morning. Dreams are important to me because they stand as a reminder that all is not orderly in the universe. Life is an enigma. Life is surprising. The unknown and the unknowable and our relative smallness in the universe are very important in maintaining my own spiritual ideology.

Apart from the inspiration I derive from a powerful dream, these “night diaries” also represent veiled insights into my own psyche. Houses, both strange and familiar, are reoccurring themes in my dreams, as well as elemental things such as wind, water and fire. I am aware of the Jungian impulse to interpret these things outright, but I am equally satisfied to be awed by the seemingly infinite and unknowable well that they originate from.”

-Brian Hoover