“Just like I can choose to stop making that line on that canvas,
I have choice to stop making that pattern in life.” – Veta McFall
Professional artist and Hoffman Process graduate Veta McFall felt a growing call for change within as she approached her 40th birthday. Until then, she’d been a commissioned portrait painter of people and animals. This was a call for deeper creativity. It started a mysterious process as she began to paint with her hands and watch the abstract art appear without any expectations. Veta had no idea what the paintings would eventually become. These new abstract paintings “would literally be a visual representation of her personal inner transformation.”
More than Veta’s painting changed; her relationship with her husband changed, too. As a couple, they had been in a multi-year cycle of tumultuous upheaval. Veta felt compelled to stop that cycle. That was “the most difficult winter of our, and our whole family’s, life.” This was when both Veta and her husband came to the Hoffman Process. Veta attended in April 2025, and her husband came seven months later. They now have a shared Hoffman experience and profound spiritual connection.
As Veta tells us, “It’s like the artwork started, and the artwork had to be this catalyst for change for me, and I thought it was just in the artwork, but it led to change within me as a person. It led to change within my relationship. It’s like I understand all of it now.” Listen in to hear the lessons Veta’s art taught her post-Hoffman.
We hope you enjoy this inspiring conversation with Veta and Sadie.
“What’s my medium? Life.”
For Veta McFall, art is the act of bringing something into existence that did not exist before, allowing creation to emerge directly from the soul.
Veta is a lifelong professional artist who built a thriving career creating large-scale, black-and-white commissioned portraits of people and animals. Known for their precision and emotional depth, her dramatic works, where every eyelash and reflection mattered, moved audiences deeply. Alongside her studio practice, she taught portrait drawing and painting at a Waldorf high school for over a decade.
As she approached 40, Veta felt a growing call for change. While her work was successful, she realized it was shaped largely by the expectations of others rather than her own inner truth. This pivotal moment coincided with her discovery of the Hoffman Process, marking the beginning of a profound personal and artistic transformation.
Out of this shift emerged The 1985 Series, a collection of 100 large-scale paintings defined by color, freedom, and expression. Each piece is titled only by the number in which it was created, intentionally leaving meaning open to the viewer. Midway through the project, after completing Painting Fifty, Veta traveled alone to the woods of rural Canada, an experience that became a turning point in her life and work.
After completing the Hoffman Process in April 2025, her art evolved again, revealing deeper coherence and clarity, as if the messages within the work had finally been fully understood.
Born in St. Petersburg, Russia, and raised in the Waldorf education system, Veta comes from a multigenerational family of artists. Today, her work reflects an integrated life, where inner transformation and creative freedom meet, and where life itself becomes the medium.
Learn more at www.vetaart.com. Follow Veta on Instagram.
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Hoffman’s Canada site: Sanctum Retreat, Calgary, Alberta, Canada