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For the first eight years of his life, Eric Hopkins saw the world as intense blobs of color and shape and movement, all filtered through his native North Haven island light. When his first pair of glasses finally brought the world into focus, his artistic vision seems to have been already set—around color, shape, movement, and light, with a big-picture point of view.
Once you have seen a Hopkins painting—dynamic, soaring aerial images with quirky angles and gaspingly intense colors—you will know one anywhere. It’s as recognizable as a Beatles song.
Operating his own gallery and studio on North Haven, and now in Rockland, has made Eric Hopkins not just an artist, but an entrepreneur in the truest sense of the word. And this summer what the entrepreneur has to reckon with is his own dynamic presence: Living on an island with an expanded summer population is one thing; the mainland with its year-round burgeoning arts community in Rockland, quite another. He loves art, and he loves people, and he loves this planet. So he’s a busy guy.
Hopkins’ new connected studio and gallery (a former garage and pool hall) are over 5,000 square feet, with white walls, large open spaces, a decidedly spunky industrial edge to it all.
Although Hopkins defines his medium as “ideas and color and light,” the down-to-earth materials can include all varieties of paint, powdered glass, sand, plaster of Paris, crayon, wood, rock, and molten glass. Over the years, he has also taken photographs—from the air, from his boat, even sometimes from land. Once you see those photographs—and you will, as Hopkins launches himself as a photographer this year—you’ll recognize the clear genesis of his paintings, and the way his mind connects everything.
This year also marks a significant return to his roots as a glass artist, roots that go back to his boyhood days on the island when he and his brothers and cousins would build “these big hellacious” bonfires and place glass Coke bottles by the side of the fire to melt. Once the temperature rose to about 900°F, the glass would start to move, and Hopkins would start to poke around in the slurry of it all.
A self-described fire-and-water kind of guy, Eric Hopkins, 40-odd years later, is likely the guy who would still be willing to explore the innards of that bonfired glass, given the chance.
You’ve spent almost your entire life on North Haven. Why did you move your studio/gallery to the mainland?
I wanted to build a small 40-foot-by-40-foot building [to replace his 40-by-18 studio], and it was going to cost three quarters of a million bucks because it was on North Haven.
Any regrets?
Absolutely not. There are some compromises, like the lighting, but we’re working on it.
How did island life shape your relationship with art?
On islands, you know your boundaries. You’re bound by water, by land. You know where the edges start and stop, but at the same time there are no boundaries. There’s a certain freedom growing up on an island.
What about art instruction as a child, any of that?
No, but I saw working artists on the island all the time. The energy of art was everywhere. I can remember my brothers and I looking into strange black boxes filled with scraps of wood from broken lobster traps, chair parts. It was Louise Nevelson’s work, in the Thorndike Hotel lobby. We all laughed, but I sensed the importance of those common things elevated to art.
I think of your post-high school educational journey [USM, Montserrat, Haystack, and Marlboro College before settling in at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD)] as a series of one-year stands.
Sometimes one-semester stands.
What were you looking for?
Me. I was always looking for me. When I was in high school, I wanted to go to RISD, but I didn’t get in, so I did the thrift shop education. There was no reason I should have gotten in after high school. Out of four years at Rockland High School, I was allowed to take art one year.
After RISD, you made quite a name for yourself as a glass artist. You had a show on Madison Avenue, big things were happening, and you walked away from it 25 years ago. Why?
I was bored out of my skull. The glass world expected me to be doing that forever. I didn’t know what I wanted, but I knew I didn’t care about making glass geegaws. It was about the material, light, color, the fluidity. And then I came back to the island in ’81. It was more real and grounded. I started taking flying lessons, which is all about energy management, thrust and drag, and it gave me a way to continue to deal with my conceptual ideas of movement and space. And then I started to paint.
Why the return to glass now?
Glass had a profound influence on the way I paint. With glass, you get working along, and snap. The glass doesn’t bounce. It cracks, gone. Big deal! You just get up and start all over. Why glass now? It was just time. Every day is a new day and I’m thinking in new ways and walking the world differently than I did 20 years ago or five years ago. I am alive at this second. The here and now is very important. I’m linked to the rest of it, but I’m always more interested in what I’m doing than what I’ve done.
There’s so much rhythm in all your work that it seems like there’s a direct connection to music.
Absolutely, a billion percent. I call it visual jazz. I love movement and I love stillness. Like the space between the notes. You need that. I like to think there’s a lot of space in my paintings. Music has always been very important in my life. I work with music. There’s a lot of color in music. I tend toward the jazz spectrum—Coltrane, Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins.
Did you grow up with them?
Oh, no. I grew up listening to Hank Williams and Patsy Cline.
You island Hopkinses go back to just after the Revolutionary War [when Dr. Theophilus Hopkins accepted land instead of money for his service in the war]. So how many of you are there on North Haven now?
Nobody can count that high! Seriously, there were three generations of Dr. Theophilus Hopkins, and one had 28 kids! Back then, there were times that Rockland had to send out to North Haven to get one of them when they needed a doctor.
Is that why North Haven looks like the center of the universe in your paintings?
Well, it is! Really, though, if you look at a chart of Maine, Penobscot Bay, the way it comes out of the river and opens up, it’s really the apex of the coast. The Penobscot is pretty much dead center of the watershed that is Maine.
You have a very distinct point of view. I might be putting words in your mouth, but it seems to be the vision of an omniscient narrator who actually sees the planet as voluptuous—and I hesitate to say this—healthy.
You can put those words in my mouth any day. I believe in the guy up there. Things deteriorate. Things are bad. Things are rotten, and out of rot you get soil. We have the power to screw it up. We have the power to fix it up. Look how friggin’ cool this place is.
What is it about looking down at the Earth from a plane that feeds you?
It makes me feel good. I feel very alive. You can see how connected things are. I remember flying over Vinalhaven and North Haven at a mile high, and seeing Friendship, Monhegan, Bucksport, Katahdin, all the way to Acadia, and knowing I was at the height of the glacier, literally in the center of Penobscot Bay, and 10,000 years ago it was all covered with ice. It puts things in perspective.
I see a lot of works in progress in your studio. I take it you don’t work on one piece at a time.
I’m not a linear kind of guy. One piece gives me 20 more ideas. I might file some things, but I’m working on multiple projects all the time.
What’s your work schedule like?
I don’t work. You know how musicians play? I just play. I play with color. I play with materials. My absolute favorite paintings or glass or sculpture, whatever, took the least amount of time. It’s not about time and labor. It’s about play and loving what you’re doing, having fun, living it up.
Once you have seen a Hopkins painting—dynamic, soaring aerial images with quirky angles and gaspingly intense colors—you will know one anywhere. It’s as recognizable as a Beatles song.
Operating his own gallery and studio on North Haven, and now in Rockland, has made Eric Hopkins not just an artist, but an entrepreneur in the truest sense of the word. And this summer what the entrepreneur has to reckon with is his own dynamic presence: Living on an island with an expanded summer population is one thing; the mainland with its year-round burgeoning arts community in Rockland, quite another. He loves art, and he loves people, and he loves this planet. So he’s a busy guy.
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Hopkins’ new connected studio and gallery (a former garage and pool hall) are over 5,000 square feet, with white walls, large open spaces, a decidedly spunky industrial edge to it all.
Although Hopkins defines his medium as “ideas and color and light,” the down-to-earth materials can include all varieties of paint, powdered glass, sand, plaster of Paris, crayon, wood, rock, and molten glass. Over the years, he has also taken photographs—from the air, from his boat, even sometimes from land. Once you see those photographs—and you will, as Hopkins launches himself as a photographer this year—you’ll recognize the clear genesis of his paintings, and the way his mind connects everything.
This year also marks a significant return to his roots as a glass artist, roots that go back to his boyhood days on the island when he and his brothers and cousins would build “these big hellacious” bonfires and place glass Coke bottles by the side of the fire to melt. Once the temperature rose to about 900°F, the glass would start to move, and Hopkins would start to poke around in the slurry of it all.
A self-described fire-and-water kind of guy, Eric Hopkins, 40-odd years later, is likely the guy who would still be willing to explore the innards of that bonfired glass, given the chance.
You’ve spent almost your entire life on North Haven. Why did you move your studio/gallery to the mainland?
I wanted to build a small 40-foot-by-40-foot building [to replace his 40-by-18 studio], and it was going to cost three quarters of a million bucks because it was on North Haven.
Any regrets?
Absolutely not. There are some compromises, like the lighting, but we’re working on it.
How did island life shape your relationship with art?
On islands, you know your boundaries. You’re bound by water, by land. You know where the edges start and stop, but at the same time there are no boundaries. There’s a certain freedom growing up on an island.
What about art instruction as a child, any of that?
No, but I saw working artists on the island all the time. The energy of art was everywhere. I can remember my brothers and I looking into strange black boxes filled with scraps of wood from broken lobster traps, chair parts. It was Louise Nevelson’s work, in the Thorndike Hotel lobby. We all laughed, but I sensed the importance of those common things elevated to art.
I think of your post-high school educational journey [USM, Montserrat, Haystack, and Marlboro College before settling in at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD)] as a series of one-year stands.
Sometimes one-semester stands.
What were you looking for?
Me. I was always looking for me. When I was in high school, I wanted to go to RISD, but I didn’t get in, so I did the thrift shop education. There was no reason I should have gotten in after high school. Out of four years at Rockland High School, I was allowed to take art one year.
After RISD, you made quite a name for yourself as a glass artist. You had a show on Madison Avenue, big things were happening, and you walked away from it 25 years ago. Why?
I was bored out of my skull. The glass world expected me to be doing that forever. I didn’t know what I wanted, but I knew I didn’t care about making glass geegaws. It was about the material, light, color, the fluidity. And then I came back to the island in ’81. It was more real and grounded. I started taking flying lessons, which is all about energy management, thrust and drag, and it gave me a way to continue to deal with my conceptual ideas of movement and space. And then I started to paint.
Why the return to glass now?
Glass had a profound influence on the way I paint. With glass, you get working along, and snap. The glass doesn’t bounce. It cracks, gone. Big deal! You just get up and start all over. Why glass now? It was just time. Every day is a new day and I’m thinking in new ways and walking the world differently than I did 20 years ago or five years ago. I am alive at this second. The here and now is very important. I’m linked to the rest of it, but I’m always more interested in what I’m doing than what I’ve done.
There’s so much rhythm in all your work that it seems like there’s a direct connection to music.
Absolutely, a billion percent. I call it visual jazz. I love movement and I love stillness. Like the space between the notes. You need that. I like to think there’s a lot of space in my paintings. Music has always been very important in my life. I work with music. There’s a lot of color in music. I tend toward the jazz spectrum—Coltrane, Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins.
Did you grow up with them?
Oh, no. I grew up listening to Hank Williams and Patsy Cline.
You island Hopkinses go back to just after the Revolutionary War [when Dr. Theophilus Hopkins accepted land instead of money for his service in the war]. So how many of you are there on North Haven now?
Nobody can count that high! Seriously, there were three generations of Dr. Theophilus Hopkins, and one had 28 kids! Back then, there were times that Rockland had to send out to North Haven to get one of them when they needed a doctor.
Is that why North Haven looks like the center of the universe in your paintings?
Well, it is! Really, though, if you look at a chart of Maine, Penobscot Bay, the way it comes out of the river and opens up, it’s really the apex of the coast. The Penobscot is pretty much dead center of the watershed that is Maine.
You have a very distinct point of view. I might be putting words in your mouth, but it seems to be the vision of an omniscient narrator who actually sees the planet as voluptuous—and I hesitate to say this—healthy.
You can put those words in my mouth any day. I believe in the guy up there. Things deteriorate. Things are bad. Things are rotten, and out of rot you get soil. We have the power to screw it up. We have the power to fix it up. Look how friggin’ cool this place is.
What is it about looking down at the Earth from a plane that feeds you?
It makes me feel good. I feel very alive. You can see how connected things are. I remember flying over Vinalhaven and North Haven at a mile high, and seeing Friendship, Monhegan, Bucksport, Katahdin, all the way to Acadia, and knowing I was at the height of the glacier, literally in the center of Penobscot Bay, and 10,000 years ago it was all covered with ice. It puts things in perspective.
I see a lot of works in progress in your studio. I take it you don’t work on one piece at a time.
I’m not a linear kind of guy. One piece gives me 20 more ideas. I might file some things, but I’m working on multiple projects all the time.
What’s your work schedule like?
I don’t work. You know how musicians play? I just play. I play with color. I play with materials. My absolute favorite paintings or glass or sculpture, whatever, took the least amount of time. It’s not about time and labor. It’s about play and loving what you’re doing, having fun, living it up.
