Louise Hopkins, Studio Visit

Before visiting her, I try to imagine what Louise Hopkins’s studio might look like. I think of her meticulous paintings, with their multitude of tiny, precise brushstrokes. I think of the sly way in which she takes the most ordered surfaces, like maps and graph paper, and bends them to her will. If her studio is anything like her art, it will be neat and rigorously arranged.

I’m spot on. As the artist ushers me into the front room of a flat in Glasgow’s leafy Southside, I’m confronted with bright, bare floorboards, and bright bare walls. Two ink pots – black and white – balance on two empty plastic containers, and small selections of sketches and studies huddle in neat clusters around the room. The only sign of disruption is a grid of nails and nail-holes creeping up the largest wall.

I ask Hopkins if the studio is always this neat. “Not at all,” she insists. “sometimes it’s really messy. When I’m trying to work out what I want to paint, there are lots of different things around; there might be a piece of graph paper, a piece of furnishing fabric and whatever. That mess is part of what helps it to happen.”

Almost all of the pictures in the room tell the story of Hopkins’s newest painting, Relief (739), a major work on furnishing fabric currently on show in Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket Gallery. Although she has used many other surfaces such as maps and sheet music, Hopkins always returns to patterned fabric. I ask what attracts her to these things. “They’ve all got their own rules,” she tells me, “their own social patterns or formal patterns. They’re all things that have got their own particular codes.”

I ask Hopkins if she has a stash somewhere of interesting materials, waiting their turn. She says she does, but she won’t show me. She won’t even tell me where it is. “For me,” she explains, “it would make the process impossible, to show people things before I work on them.”

This is not the only time during my visit that Hopkins says no. She’s very careful about the answers she gives, often choosing to stop short of a complete explanation. She’s just like her paintings, hiding as much as she gives away.

Hopkins is happy, however, to talk me through the creation of her latest painting. First, she tried painting on the back of the fabric, where the pattern just showed through. Then, she tried the front, producing three more studies. “What’s happening here,” she explains, pointing them out, “is I’m trying to understand what I’m looking at, and also trying to find different kinds of marks that begin to work with what’s already there, but perhaps, as well, work against what’s already there.”

In the first of the studies, Hopkins has painted tiny, horizontal, black marks in the spaces between the fabric’s leafy pattern. In the next, the lines have become more sophisticated, flowing from one leaf to the next in billowing curves, and shaping the empty space between the leaves.

“There’s this repeated pattern in this fabric,” Hopkins explains, “and what I’m trying to do is change the structure of it completely. If you saw the fabric before I painted on it you’d see a certain kind of repetition, and what I’m trying to do is completely disrupt that repetition.”

Hopkins takes me across the room to the fireplace. Hanging above it are little sketches on paper, fixed modestly to the wall with slivers of masking tape. They map out the structure of the final painting, plotting the direction of the brushmarks. I notice that one is an exact replica of another, but drawn with a vigorous intensity which borders on the obsessive.

I ask the artist if she made this sketch so labour intensive to get a feel for what the final piece was going to be like. She breaks into a big, warm smile. “You never get the full feeling of what it’s going to be like! Absolutely, not at all! This is just a tiny bit of information about where I’m trying to go.”

Just beneath the sketches, a row of postcards is propped against the wall. A Cubist painting sits next to an expressive wad of clay by Arte Povera artist Lucio Fontana. Ian Hamilton Finlay follows, accompanied by Jackson Pollock. A Mondrian rests on the mantelpiece, and completing the perplexing mix is an early Renaissance painting by Paolo Uccello.

Trying to make sense of this combination, I realise that Hopkins allows herself the expressive freedom of Pollock and Fontana within strict parameters worthy of Hamilton Finlay and Mondrian. Hopkins confirms my theory. “It’s that dynamic that makes the work possible,” she says. “It’s trying to find some rules and then trying to find some subversions.”

We move back across the room to the wall full of nails. This was where, after all that preparation, Hopkins was finally able to make her painting. The rows of nails allowed her to move the enormous work up and down as she worked. “It was so big,” she says, “that it was actually quite a challenge to make it in this studio. It’s three metres wide, and so I had to look at it with [back to front] binoculars to see what it was like from a long way off.”

That wasn’t the only problem. The work was so big that Hopkins had to paint it while sitting on a chair which was balanced precariously on a table. “It was the only way of reaching it,” she says. Now when I think of Hopkins, I don’t just see a neat and tidy person in a neat and tidy studio. I see a heroic painter, scaling the heights in pursuit of the perfect subversion.

Catrìona Black, The Map, Winter 2005/06