Clyde Hopkins: Abstraction as experience

Abstract

Hopkins’ painterly abstraction reflects on a universe of disordering contingencies in everyday experience, questioning how painting can refer to such qualities of experience without engaging in representation. The immediate act of placing paint on the canvas extends to metaphorical concerns with process: how to maintain that sensation of immediacy if repetitions occur within a sequence of gestural responses. Hopkins’ work adopts different approaches at different stages; degrees of immediacy remain a consideration while attachment to a variety of motifs develops. Paintings remain continuously open to change as more reflexive approaches to the ironies of maintaining immediacy in re-presentation emerge. Resources are both visual and philosophical: the questioning of logic with ‘associationism’ found in the writings of David Hume and influencing Lawrence Sterne, a fascination with Spanish painting and its influence on Robert Motherwell, who was in turn influenced by A. N. Whitehead.