Paul Hopkinson

Paul Hopkinson has been a valued member of the Foyer Gallery since 2002.

Paul’s work passionately conveys a sense of Ottawa and our natural environment, which is fast-disappearing because of urban sprawl. In fact, Paul says the Ottawa Valley and the Ottawa River were an endless source of inspiration, which led him to create art when he was young and “art was in his veins.”

The Foyer Gallery artists believe a retrospective is needed to celebrate his vision and achievement in art and to share his vision with as many citizens of Ottawa as possible.

Paul’s story is one common to many artists. Trained as an artist in his youth, Paul put aside his artistic pursuits in order to raise a family and make a living. He was unwilling to be a ‘Sunday painter,’ feeling that his vision required his full attention to fulfill. Still, he worked with colour all his life in his career as a painter decorator.
In the last seven years, he has had the time and the freedom to resume his art career with a consuming passion, although he now has health problems, which preclude putting energy into anything more than continuing to produce his work.

Paul’s art is a wonderful blend of technical skill, sense of design and balance while combining historic narrative and elements of faith. Paul paints the beauty of the natural places around Ottawa that we pass every day but don’t take the time to enjoy. Paul’s stunning watercolours highlight the beautiful, serene and often hidden elements of nature on the edges of our environment.

Visitors to the Foyer Gallery often comment that they run, cycle or walk their dogs in the areas he has chosen to paint. They intuitively recognize Paul’s choice of scenes, but see those places with a new perspective and feeling. To these folks his works are touchstones to their environment. Paul should be credited for pursuing his art and producing such outstanding work while battling poor health and advancing age, as well as one of the most common concerns of any artist, poverty.
Yet every morning, he rises early and, if feeling healthy enough, will paint or sketch all day. Art is what he does and who he is!

He has an encyclopaedic grasp of art history, history and religion. As he gets older, he says his paintings (which he calls pictures) seem to be taking on the philosophies of the people who lived around the Mediterranean Sea. Some of his works, such as “The Hymn” and “Lord of the Dance”, are celebrations of life. Some, he says, seem to be sacred places and have a religious connotation contained in the trees around the Ottawa River and local wetlands. His water lilies and reeds reveal hidden underwater sanctuaries, similar to a cathedral nave. Other paintings reflect the seasonal and constant renewal of the environment – life continuing after a death.

Paul feels the influence of art from around the world as well. His process, from concept to final brushstroke, is long and painstaking – a labour of love and dedication. He carefully builds structure. The design and composition is more important to him than jumping to paper and painting the work. Typically, Paul will sketch a work six or seven times; then, as he likes to say, the actual painting just flows. It takes him 200 to 300 hours to produce a work. It is a spiritual quest to detail his vision of our landscape in the Ottawa region.

Paul feels he is greatly influenced by oriental art. While his paintings have perspective, they can also be understood from a purely pictorial viewpoint. The patterns in works such as the winter scene in “Greenbank Park” with the trees, branches and grass forming patterns in the snow, and his paintings of milkweeds, with the seeds dancing across the paper, passing on life to the next year, suggest a unique understanding of the east.

Gerald Smith, a well known and respected Ottawa artist and teacher at the Ottawa School of Art has written:

“Paul Hopkinson is a watercolour artist blessed with a keen understanding of what is significant in painting landscapes. He never fails to find a setting that has both pictorial interest and an awareness of the role each component can contribute to the total effect of the painting. He also has a true feeling for the innate beauty of  specific components shown in their natural settings.
His arrangements of foreground, background and sky are always wonderfully orchestrated.
In many of the paintings he also demonstrates a keen understanding of how to use darks and lights, especially in cloud shadows, to increase the emotive power of the painting. Such a painter surely deserves a wider audience for his works and I do not hesitate to recommend both Paul and his art to you.”