about
Phill Hopkins (b. 1961, Bristol) lives and works in Leeds, UK. He is a painter and
draughtsman whose practice is rooted in walking, observation, and sustained attention
to landscape as both a physical environment and a psychological field. Across painting,
drawing and works on paper, Hopkins explores how presence is registered through
movement, mark-making, and colour - not as depiction, but as lived experience
translated into form.
Walking is not incidental to Hopkins’ work but foundational. His daily practice of
moving through woods, riverbanks, fields and urban edges becomes a method of
attunement, allowing perception to unfold slowly and bodily rather than pictorially.
The resulting works do not attempt to record a view or fix a scene. Instead, they operate
as impressions - accumulations of sensation, rhythm, memory and shifting
awareness. Landscape in Hopkins’ work is something entered, navigated and inhabited
rather than observed from a distance.
A recurring motif is the solitary figure, often seen from behind and reduced to a
silhouette or shadow. This figure functions less as a subject than as a proxy for
the viewer - a reminder of human scale and vulnerability within the wider terrain. It
anchors the work without dominating it, reinforcing Hopkins’ concern with balance
between inner and outer worlds, thought and embodiment, self and environment.
Formally, Hopkins is first and foremost a mark maker. His surfaces are built
through layered gestures that oscillate between spontaneity and control. Marks behave
like a visual language - repeated, varied, revised - creating dense fields of pattern
that resist easy reading. These marks do not simply describe the land; they rephrase
it. Colour plays a crucial role in this process. Hopkins’ palettes rarely mirror
naturalistic hues. Instead, colour drifts, intensifies, and dislocates, producing
landscapes that feel at once recognisable and subtly estranged. Through this
chromatic displacement, the familiar becomes charged with inward resonance -
hovering between immediacy and memory, the immanent and the transcendent.
Hopkins has exhibited widely in the UK and internationally. Solo exhibitions
include Leeds Art Gallery, 108 Fine Art in Harrogate, and Galeria Fernando Santos in
Porto. His work has featured in group exhibitions at institutions such as the Imperial
War Museum North, the Henry Moore Institute, Kettle’s Yard, the ICA London,
Jerwood Space, Whitworth Art Gallery, Laing Art Gallery and John Hansard Gallery,
among many others. His work is held in significant public collections
including Leeds Art Gallery, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, Doncaster
Museums, the Henry Moore Centre for the Study of Sculpture, the Imperial War
Museum, and international collections in Germany, Hungary and China.
Photo Tim Balls
draughtsman whose practice is rooted in walking, observation, and sustained attention
to landscape as both a physical environment and a psychological field. Across painting,
drawing and works on paper, Hopkins explores how presence is registered through
movement, mark-making, and colour - not as depiction, but as lived experience
translated into form.
Walking is not incidental to Hopkins’ work but foundational. His daily practice of
moving through woods, riverbanks, fields and urban edges becomes a method of
attunement, allowing perception to unfold slowly and bodily rather than pictorially.
The resulting works do not attempt to record a view or fix a scene. Instead, they operate
as impressions - accumulations of sensation, rhythm, memory and shifting
awareness. Landscape in Hopkins’ work is something entered, navigated and inhabited
rather than observed from a distance.
A recurring motif is the solitary figure, often seen from behind and reduced to a
silhouette or shadow. This figure functions less as a subject than as a proxy for
the viewer - a reminder of human scale and vulnerability within the wider terrain. It
anchors the work without dominating it, reinforcing Hopkins’ concern with balance
between inner and outer worlds, thought and embodiment, self and environment.
Formally, Hopkins is first and foremost a mark maker. His surfaces are built
through layered gestures that oscillate between spontaneity and control. Marks behave
like a visual language - repeated, varied, revised - creating dense fields of pattern
that resist easy reading. These marks do not simply describe the land; they rephrase
it. Colour plays a crucial role in this process. Hopkins’ palettes rarely mirror
naturalistic hues. Instead, colour drifts, intensifies, and dislocates, producing
landscapes that feel at once recognisable and subtly estranged. Through this
chromatic displacement, the familiar becomes charged with inward resonance -
hovering between immediacy and memory, the immanent and the transcendent.
Hopkins has exhibited widely in the UK and internationally. Solo exhibitions
include Leeds Art Gallery, 108 Fine Art in Harrogate, and Galeria Fernando Santos in
Porto. His work has featured in group exhibitions at institutions such as the Imperial
War Museum North, the Henry Moore Institute, Kettle’s Yard, the ICA London,
Jerwood Space, Whitworth Art Gallery, Laing Art Gallery and John Hansard Gallery,
among many others. His work is held in significant public collections
including Leeds Art Gallery, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, Doncaster
Museums, the Henry Moore Centre for the Study of Sculpture, the Imperial War
Museum, and international collections in Germany, Hungary and China.
Photo Tim Balls