Clyde Hopkins

" One of the great qualities of Hopkins' new paintings, as I see them, is to have abandoned the particularly English problem of whether abstract art needs to be in some painterly relation to landscape. He has decided that it would be better to avoid the term entirely. On the contrary, it is through recollections of Dali, Miro, even Picasso, that the artist has remembered how the sun can sharpen the shadows, heat the landscape, and probably addle the brains. Are we madder or saner now? It makes no difference. In Hopkins' new world, it is advisable to try for both. " © Brandon Taylor, 2012.

"The elements in Hopkins' work seem to come from strikingly different, even contradictory, tradi­tions, as if he is seeking to cover extremes of expressive language, rather than occupy a unified middle-ground. The juxtaposition produces a peculiarly complementary effect, as though two implacably opposed artistic visions had collided in the same work. The result is an increase in intensity so great that the contents of the painting seem to pass through a tangible ordeal, a sort of visual pain barrier, which strips them of lyrical compromise, and aesthetic consolation and delivers, in the place of these lesser pleasures, the unmistakable rewards of serious poetry." © David Sweet, 1996.

" Hopkins is faintly exasperating in his use of high-flown or opaque titles, assigned to paintings which, if we are to believe the artist, are not about anything whatever that might be defined in words. 'What is this slab of vermilion pigment doing in this corner?' I ask politely, hopeful as ever of enlightenment. 'Balancing the other patch of vermilion in the other corner', says Hopkins, equally polite but quite properly evasive in response. Nothing is about anything. I find that the painting is called A Day at the Races ... Hopkins' paintings don't really require words: they are, finally, so spectacular and evocative on their own terms, so fulsomely expressive, that something filters into our awareness and finally they make a world of their own. They add to one's sense of life very strongly, they expand and contract in one's memory, and they belong to European painting. " © Bryan Robertson. 1990.