Sharon Van Etten, one of the paintings Christy Hopkins has sold through Seattle Art Source, moves through a palette of muted greens, softened mauves, warm rust, and chalked white, broken by occasional flashes of blue. The surface carries the evidence of its own making: layers built up, disrupted, and partially erased, so that earlier gestures stay visible underneath later ones rather than being smoothed away. Structure and release sit in the same passage without one winning out — the painting reads less like a fixed image than like a record of decisions accumulating over time.
That approach runs through Hopkins’s broader practice. A second-generation, self-taught painter working out of Seattle, she treats mark-making, layering, and discovery as the actual method rather than preparation for one — narrative and gesture are allowed to surface on their own rather than being planned in beforehand. Music runs alongside the process in her studio, and she has described the drive behind it plainly: “painting is my language.”
The recognition has followed the work rather than the other way around. Hopkins is represented by Seattle Art Source and Studio Shop Gallery, has shown at MASH Gallery, Domicile Gallery, and The Other Art Fair, and her paintings have been written up in Vogue Living and Luxe Magazine and included in ArtFOLIO2021’s list of the year’s most exciting artists. Sharon Van Etten, acrylic on canvas at 64 by 60 inches, found a buyer through that gallery relationship — one of the pieces that moved from studio to collection before most viewers ever got to see it in person.
Sharon Van Etten, along with the rest of Christy Hopkins’s work, is on display on her artist profile on Art Fair.
