We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful David Hopes. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with David below.
David, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Did you always know you wanted to pursue a creative or artistic career? When did you first know?
If you had asked me what I wanted to be at age five I would have said, “an artist,” without actually knowing what that meant or was. I was a sickly child, and when I think back, I believe that prints and reproductions on the walls of doctors’ offices provided my first introduction to “the image.” They were heavily serene Impressionist works, but the ones that struck me were harder edged, more “scientific,” as I might have put it then. I took the paintings as data, as part of the truth of the world. What early progress might have ensued was detoured by an eighth grade art teacher who said, before the class, “David, you will never be an artist.” I took this for truth, and as I was “academically gifted,” there were other options.
Skip ahead thirty or more years. I’m a tenured Professor teaching English and creative writing. I’m a reasonably well-known playwright and a quite well-known poet. I begin dating a series of artist and gallery owners. I sit and watch them paint, learning technique without meaning to. I help hang gallery shows, and help a lover open a new downtown gallery. Invisible energy builds, until on one particular day–it seems to me–it can no longer be set aside, and I go to the art supply store and ask what I can get for my niece to start her painting. Of course I mean me, but I’m too embarrassed to say it. I paint all night. At dawn I stand looking at the paintings I’ve done on cheap panels, all lined up on the fireplace mantel. They’re awful, but I’m mesmerized. I weep with a gratitude dificult to explain.
Fast forward two years and I own a downtown gallery, called Urthona, after the character in Blake’s Four Zoas. The gallery finally loses enough money that I give it up, but I still call my from-home art endeavor “Urthona.”
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
In this avatar, I am a painter in oils and egg tempera, whose works can be purchased on line, and seen on the Urthona Gallery extension of my facebook account. My work tends to be either symbolic (one comercial gallery rejected me because my work was “spiritual” and thus wouldn’t sell) or closely detailed nature paintings. If it’s singular you want, come here to get it.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
In 2020 the roof of my studio in the River Arts District fails, and every time it rains there are pools of water on the floor. The managers of the building want me to keep paying rent without fxing the roof. I suffered from pretty severe anemia at the time, and the climb up rickety stairs to my studio required almost more determination than I had. The elevator was out of order, so there were no other options. COVID had begun to terrify everybody. One day I realized I had to turn my back and leave everything, that clinging and hoping were not working for me. so on Leap Day, 2020, I opened my studio and told people to take whatever they wanted. When I returned that evening I locked the door on dozens of paintings and thousands of dollars worth of furniture, books, art supplies. I never went there again. I stopped painting. I assumed that phase of my life was over. In the fall of 2022 I went to the store and bought paints and started again. The first thing I noticed was that I was a measurably better painter: things that had been hard easy for me now, things that I thought too advanced for me to attempt flowing ot of the end of the brush. I shurgged, accepted the strange blessing, took up somewhere in advance of where I’d left off.
Alright – so here’s a fun one. What do you think about NFTs?
NFTs shift the emphasis of art from connoisseurship, or simple appreciation, to ownership– like a dragon squatting on its hoard without really enjoying anything. I also think they’re a grift, ultimately of no value, or of such tenuous value they require more time defending them than enjoying them. But, I guess, any way to get money to the artist has some value.
Contact Info:
- Website: davidbrendanhopes.com (in process)
- Instagram: DavidBHopes
- Facebook: David Hopes