Duncan Hopkins

Why do I make paintings? Essentially, I make paintings because I like to make pictures. I have always made pictures for enjoyment, communication or as secret codes. Over the years I have made images using collage, photography, drawing, more paint, print and digital media – some for myself, some for clients. I have made pictures that stand still and hang on walls, and pictures which move.

This year I am mainly making pictures out of paint, on flat white surfaces.

How do I make paintings? What are they pictures of? What do they mean?

The transference of vision – eyes, the input and gaze, the dream, the desire, the fear, meditation and memory. Move it to the surface, mark it with the hands and the body. The craft of mark-making, the particular language of materials – processes in rendering the marks as readability. Use hand-held power tools – the bowl, brush, pencil, knife. Take the colours and carriers, combine them through making those marks.

These marks are my language. Signs, symbols, fields and energies of form. Combined and crafted in ways that respond to my reading of the place and space I sense, releasing the mysteries of control and chance to invoke images governed by an innate sense of structure which could be called aesthetic.

There are references to art history, events, and there is a bridge between realism and the fantastic, the sensible and outsideness. These sources are layered and filtered into an emerging painting. The creative process occurs and develops through the activism of painting. Decisions, expressions and compromises happen during these mark-making events, to reveal unique solutions that often include surprises and new knowledge for me about making images. One objective of creating these paintings is for the viewer to perhaps connect visually, sensually or emotionally with the image, and share a recognized experience.

I am moved by the rural landscape, but question the conventions and purpose of landscape painting. It is a place discreetly inhabited. There may or may not be people. There may be involvement or disconnection. It is a place of objects which suggest half-known stories. It is a place where escape is fragile or resolute. It is a place of psychic metaphor. It is a place where objects are rendered as pure energy.

I paint to integrate these material and experiential elements. I expand the connections between my pictures through exhibition and display.

Tagged: acrylic, action, boats, cornwall, design, devon, digital, drawing, environmental, illustration, installation, landscapes, MA, marine, multimedia, oils, painting, pencil, photography, photoshop, portraits, seascape, storms, visual, watercolour, websites