“The Hopkins are like these sirens, you know, they start singing their song, and everyone gets attracted to the island,” explains artist David Wilson, who, along with his partner David Hopkins, runs Hopkins Wharf Gallery on North Haven Island, approximately 12 miles offshore from Rockland. “The Davids,” as they are affectionately known, have been together for nearly 50 years. They met in 1975 as students in London. Hopkins was in his junior year abroad from Syracuse University, where he majored in museum studies, and Wilson was studying painting at St. Martins School of Art. A native of Scotland, Wilson followed Hopkins back to Syracuse, where he earned his MFA from the School of Visual and Performing Arts. Hopkins went on to a 30-plus-year career at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Throughout their time together, summers were spent on North Haven, where Hopkins grew up. The cluster of buildings comprising Hopkins Wharf was once owned by his great-grandfather; today, one serves as the gallery—which David started with his brother, artist Eric Hopkins, when he was 14, and Eric was 16—and another is the couple’s home. In recent years, a former icehouse on the property was transformed for temporary art exhibitions. The couple has lived year-round on the island since Hopkins retired from The Met in 2010. Wilson’s curio-filled studio is on the gallery’s second floor, where I caught up with him to discuss his recent work.
SM: There’s a decided shift in scale in your paintings from the past few years; what prompted the decision to work larger?
DW: I realized I’d been working on a very small scale for nearly 20 years, sometimes no bigger than a postcard. There was something monkish about my practice then; it was deeply personal and inward-looking. After this long gestation, I was ready to do something different. The new work is very much connected with the outer world.
SM: Did moving year-round to the island influence this new direction in the work?
DW: Over the years, I’d been looking at nature and landscape, but it consolidated with the move to Maine, and the fact that I had my studio to work in. I had space, and I had this broad view, the whole island environment—the ocean, the rocks, the sky. Before, I was more in my own head; now, I feel I am more here, on this planet.
SM: Do you feel a kinship between the Maine environment and your native Scotland?
DW: Absolutely, particularly regarding the spruce or the pine tree. My mother was a keen amateur painter, and my grandfather and great-grandfather were both painters, so I’ve always felt connected to this artistic milieu. I remember particularly a work by my grandfather, a pen and ink drawing with a bit of watercolor of a single pine tree; it resonates with me today. It’s almost like the tree has become my badge. I’m interested in heraldry and how shapes and figures in a landscape can be reduced to potent symbols. I think that’s what I’m still trying to do, now on a larger scale.
SM: Are there other ways your Scottish heritage is expressed in the work?
DW: I’ve been calling this series I’ve been working on for about four years now Black Watch, after the Scottish tartan, which is originally a military regiment. My grandfather was in the Black Watch in the First World War. I feel a lot of Scottish associations with it, but the title is just very evocative to me, sort of a black watch on nature, watching, observing, but keeping an eye out, too. A watchman guards and observes.
SM: The paintings have a distinctive surface texture that adds to their sensory, otherworldly quality. What material are you using to achieve this?
DW: It’s a fabric called Monk’s cloth, used for carpet backing and tapestry needlepoint. It comes in different grades and thicknesses and has an open, grid-like weave. It’s quite porous; I’m using it lined with muslin on the stretcher so it doesn’t act as a sieve. But I love the texture of it; when the brush skims over the top, you get an almost pixelated effect because it breaks the paint up into little squares. You can achieve some really tremendous effects with it.
SM: Can you talk about the paintings underway in the studio?
DW: As mentioned, I work in series, exploring certain themes, which, at the moment, seems to be the cycle of growth and decay, the live tree growing out of a dead tree, the shelf fungus on the rotting tree stump. I have, in the past, painted on actual fungus. I have a series that picks up on the folk art tradition of shelf fungus being carved into or painted on. I like the idea that somehow, you’re reviving the tree by painting on the fungus—the concept of the predation of nature, of things feeding on one another and being connected in that way.
SM: There is a transcendental aspect to your work, as well, that calls to mind artists like Charles Burchfield, where the mystery of nature is intimated.
DW: Yes, this notion that everything is connected, there’s definitely truth to that, but, for me, that’s not the end of the story; there’s the mystery beyond. I think the key is following those connections, going down the rabbit hole, and looking for openings. There are holes and portals that feature in my work that I’m alluding to, and I hope the viewer, perhaps, can make those connections themselves and see that I’m striving for something beyond. That’s the type of painting that’s always interested me. ▪
David Wilson is represented by Hopkins Wharf Gallery, 7 Hopkins Wharf, North Haven, Maine.
