As a painter and an educator Clyde had a profound and lasting influence on all those around him - an influence which continues to be assessed with his inclusion in the Tate Collection in 2020, the Hepworth Collection in 2024, and recent solo shows in Barrow, Deal, London and New York. As the weight and significance of his work is brought to light, it becomes increasingly clear that his contribution to contemporary painting, and British abstraction in particular, was extraordinary.

You would expect a body of work, created over a span more than forty years, to display a pattern of development from early attempts, to the mature output where an artist’s ‘signature style’ has fully evolved and is then consolidated. But the paintings of Clyde Hopkins seem to resist this schematic interpretation. Those from the late seventies and early eighties are stylistically different to those produced in the late eighties. Another change occurs in the nineties and from 2008 or thereabouts the paintings seem to take on characteristics almost the opposite of those to be found in work from earlier in his career. So, instead of one signature style, there are several.

Each of these signature styles is fully resolved and sufficient, rather than marking an evolutionary stage in an ongoing narrative. Each deploys an established set of procedures and material properties. The pattern that emerges is more a series of brackets rather than a smooth gradient, each bracket containing a group of works with similar visual qualities.

David Sweet

… 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 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 both.

Brandon Taylor

…Wobbly rectangles all connecting, configurations within configurations, hot colour, imitation surfaces and real surfaces, dots and flat areas, emerging silhouette shapes that recall splashy hieroglyph figures by Miro, and funny island and bay contours that suggest garden evocations by Patrick Heron (they might be earnest homages to Heron or wry jokes on the cult of him): this is all in Clyde’s stuff. Plus the feeling of Robert Motherwell’s Little Spanish Prison (the constructed, charming side of Abstract Expressionism), the feeling of Stuart Davis’s awesomely solid American-style Cubism, Patrick Caulfield’s understated English suburban Pop art, USA cartoons, The Flintstones, funny westerns and towns with the word Gulch in the name: he gives you all these layers of pleasure.

Matthew Collings

Born in Bexhill on Sea, Sussex in 1946, Hopkins studied Fine Art BA at the University of Reading in 1965 and went on to exhibit widely both in the UK and internationally for over 40 years. He taught as Head of Painting at Winchester School of Art 1982 - 1990 and Chelsea College of Art from 1990 until retiring in 2006 when he was made an Emeritus Professor.

For 30 years Hopkins worked from studios in South London, firstly in Greenwich, before moving to Art in Perpetuity Trust Studios (APT), Deptford which he co-founded in 1995.