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Shelley Hopkins, Memphis,TN

Biography
Shelley Hopkins is an artist living and working in Memphis, Tennessee with her husband and four children. Through her work she explores themes of life’s circumstances and the beauty or pain therein, predominantly in the oil on canvas medium with forays into murals and found objects. She started her career as a muralist in Starkville, Mississippi. Her murals can be found in private residences, corporate offices, and churches in Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee. She returned to her birthplace, Memphis, in 2002, and attended Memphis College of Art. Memphis’ rich heritage and diverse culture sitting in conjunction with modern suburban life provide the perfect backdrop for her painting. Her paintings have found homes in private and corporate collections throughout the South. Recently she painted the Christmas card for Ryan’s Hope, a nonprofit organization raising funds to support disabled children. Her work has also been featured in a recent series of Spectacular Homes of Tennessee, a showcase of top interior designers and decorators in the region. Shelley also teaches privately and through workshops in the Memphis Area. Her works are currently sold exclusively through DCI Gallery in Memphis, Tennessee.

Artist Statement
My latest series of paintings are glimpses of memory, family, and circumstance. The work is mainly oil on canvas, worked and reworked, primarily with a knife. The figures are ambiguous and faded like memory and sometimes blend with structure and space. The works are typically descriptions and interpretations based on a photograph or actual event and the memory coinciding. Each story expresses the emotion and adventure of youth joining with the abstract structure of looming adulthood. The figures float on the canvas in dreamlike innocence. Tension exists between the figures simple form and the background hinting at the end of innocence and the path to adulthood. Poetry by Paul Hopkins inspired by the paintings or the memories associated often accompanies the works.

Remembrance

The day I fell will long be remembered
By others better than I
For the mind can be bothered by a blow
To blacken the light of the eye
Clarity of the moment cannot be found
Though not for lack of seeking
It has disappeared in a foggy shroud
A memory must be in keeping
The passage of time cannot be blamed for this loss
For to lose one must own
And although the flesh was there at the time
The mind had mirthfully flown
In a house of sage on a floor of age
Old hat on young head did own
A smile so bright charged the night
And the bolt was savagely sown
While the heavenly haze of that eve does claim
The memory so blurred and banded
The elephant on an island displays
The luckiest has yet landed.