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  "Perseverance" 24x30, oil on canvas  Daily painting is a...

"Patience" 8x10, oil on canvas At this rate August is going to last me the...

                        "Contain Multitudes" 24x24, oil on canvas [creativ_button url="https://denisehopkinsfineart.com/product/containing-multitudes-24x24-oil-on-canvas/" icon="" label="Buy Now"...

                        "Face your Fears" 6x6, oil on canvas [creativ_button url="https://denisehopkinsfineart.com/product/face-your-fears-6x6-oil-on-canvas/" icon="" label="Buy Now" colour="blue"...

“Vision, Uncertainty, and Knowledge of Materials are inevitabilities that all artists must acknowledge and learn from: vision is always ahead of execution, knowledge of materials is your contact with reality, and uncertainty is a virtue." “You make good work by (among...

“When tea becomes ritual, it takes its place at the heart of our ability to see greatness in small things. Where is beauty to be found? In great things that, like everything else, are doomed to die, or in small things that aspire to nothing, yet know how to set a...

Noise. I talk a lot in this blog about making space for quiet, for focus, for art. This weekend I realized that there's good noise and the then there's the wrong kind of noise, and it's helped me set an new intention for my work. I live in a town with three rivers...

                                “Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant, there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing–and keeping the unknown always beyond...

“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns…” Matthew...

If you get, give. If you learn, teach.  — Maya Angelou   I’m ready to paint. I step into my studio, turn on the lights, and, then, almost without fail, it hits me: It’s lonely in here. On our way to summer camp this morning, my son and I passed a...

School has been out less than two weeks, and my kindergarten graduate and I have already been to the beach, cruised up and down the Tchefuncte river a handful of times, hit up the neighborhood pool, stayed up too late watching movies and eating popcorn, and made...

  One step at a time. Rome wasn’t built in a day. One foot in front of the other. A journey of 1000 miles begins with a single step....

If you had happened to drive by house this morning, you would have seen me crawled inside an overturned garbage can muttering what felt like futile prayers to St. Anthony as I slowly removed, piece by piece, those lingering bits of trash that cling to the bottom and...

I’ve been really interested in faces lately, and I’ve been drawing/painting them... in my head. It doesn’t sound very productive, I know. Stay with me. I’m trying to see where colors are warm and where they are cool. Where the lightest values reveal themselves (the...

For months I had been creating work for the Big Easel outdoor art show in Lafayette, Louisiana. When a bride randomly emailed and asked me to paint at her Lafayette wedding the day before the show, I thought it was fate-- Lafayette and I were going to have a...

Spring is like a perhaps hand (which comes carefully out of Nowhere)arranging a window,into which people look(while people stare arranging and changing placing carefully there a strange thing and a known thing here)and changing everything carefully spring is like a...

It never fails. I can tell someone the price of a painting, and, with a look of shock, they will walk away, whispering to a friend words like “outrageous.” Minutes later another person will say things like “reasonable” and “affordable.” Ever since I was little, my...

The Art of Patience My son’s school is learning a new word. When I chaperoned a field trip a couple of weeks ago, I saw it accompanied by a simple, straightforward definition on posters as I walked the halls to his classroom. Later that evening, I opened his homework...

I’m not sure I’m the best person to write about how to eliminate distractions, but I have been working on it. One of my mom’s favorite stories about my childhood is this: She’d send me upstairs to my room for some purpose, and I’d come back down nonchalantly, many...

I heard this story of a famous guitarist recently. When interviewed and asked what he liked to play “for fun” he replied, exasperated, “Fun? This is work!” Painting has felt a lot like work lately, but last week I had the opportunity to spend three days in Fort...

"Wisely and slow. They stumble that run fast." --Shakespeare It’s been three weeks now, but I’m still thinking about my January 31 paintings in 31 days mostly because I miss the unique magic of the ritual-- the power to slow down time. When I looked at the date on my...

I think I figured out the secret to daily painting. But you'll have to stick with me for a moment first. Above you'll see most of my 31 paintings from the January daily painting challenge (I couldn't find a layout that would fit them all). I was joined by a host of...

"Looking back/Looking ahead" 4x4, oil on canvas “You might be scared to start. That’s natural. There’s this very real thing that runs rampant in educated people. It’s called “impostor syndrome.” The clinical definition is a “psychological phenomenon in which people...

"Waiting for Spring" 6x6, oil on canvas  Yesterday as I was scrolling...

"Song I Can't Unlearn" 6x6, oil on canvas.   What if you could look at a song, hold it up to the light and see what shapes form? Take in the whole thing all at once and not moment by moment, note by note? I think it is probably why I paint and why, although I...

Two weekends ago I was running the half marathon feeling great. And then mile 9 hit and my knee felt like it wanted to explode. That's when I looked up to see my family-- my brother, my sister and her three kids (all under three) had come out in the freezing cold just...

"Blue Blur" 6x6, oil on canvas  Still a bird.  But I had some big...

"Flash" 4x4, oil on canvas  I'm working on some other paintings right now but...

"Walk the line" 16x20, oil on canvas. Early in this 31 day challenge, my...