I begin with looking, walking, being in a landscape, paying attention. I make photographs as a way of remembering what I have seen and felt. They are not records, but a kind of sketchbook, a way of staying with something. I make marks before I have words for what I am doing. Line, gesture, texture, shadow and colour begin to find their own rhythm. The painting develops through looking, making and looking again. I am interested in the relationship between myself and the natural world, not as something separate from me, but as something I am part of. Sometimes a tree. Sometimes a path. Sometimes a figure. Sometimes snow. I look for colour, but more often I find it. I don't always know what a painting is about. Perhaps that is part of why I need to make it. There is a point when something shifts, a feeling in the body, a quiet recognition: Yes. That’s it. The painting can then stand on its own.

Phill Hopkins (b. 1961, Bristol) is a British painter and draughtsman who lives and works

in Leeds. A graduate of Goldsmiths, Hopkins has exhibited extensively in the UK and

internationally since the 1980s, with solo and two-person exhibitions including Leeds Art

Gallery, Galeria Fernando Santos in Porto and 108 Fine Art, Harrogate. His work has been

shown at major UK institutions and galleries including the Imperial War Museum, Kettle’s

Yard, the ICA, Whitworth Art Gallery, Laing Art Gallery, Jerwood Space and the Henry

Moore Institute, alongside exhibitions in Europe, the USA, Australia and China. His work

is held in significant public and private collections including Leeds Art Gallery, the Imperial

War Museum, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, the Henry Moore Centre for the

Study of Sculpture, the Hungarian Museum of Photography, Stadt Dortmund and the

Sherwin Collection at The Hepworth Wakefield, as well as private collections across the

UK, Europe, USA, Australia and China.