2/3 – 1998
Oil on fabric
30.5 x 17.5 cm

Louise Hopkins is a contemporary British artist living and painting in Glasgow. She studied and graduated from the Glasgow School of Art (1994) and Newcastle Polytechnic (1988).
She has exhibited at The Fruitmarket Gallery in 2005, The Tramway in Glasgow, amongst many other solo exhibitions and Hopkins is a regular at the Doggerfisher Gallery in Edinburgh. In 2007 she exhibited at the 52nd Venice Biennale for Scotland.
I really enjoy Louise Hopkins work because it is very rich, as she rarely starts on a blank surface; her surfaces range from fabric, maps, sheet music, graph paper and pages from history books. I think this gives her paintings and drawings a personal feel even before she has touched the page, since the backgrounds were chosen personally by her and must have a meaning. She engages the surface which she is drawing on, yet is able to transform it. She has painted on an image of a map as to re-produce the image as a painting, yet she doesn’t destroy the meaning of the surface because she wants to retain the information it holds. Protect it, so to speak.

My favourite piece of hers is:
Wood – 2003
Acrylic ink on photograph
30.5 x 17.5 cm

It’s so beautiful, it makes me want to go live in a remote place in Sweden or Norway, just living off the land. It makes me feel at home, protected. The work in itself is so simple, she isn’t letting us forget the surface, it is in fact highlighted. It shows what it once was, alive.

A of the was – 2005
Correction fluid, ink and coloured pencil on page from book
30.5 x 24.5
I’d just like to remind Peter, that correction fluid is also Tippex.