PRESS
Carolyn DiFiori Hopkins
“A Gesture Toward the Earth”
New Works in Painting and Drawing
Albany, NY – Summer 2025
In her newest body of work, multidisciplinary artist Carolyn DiFiori Hopkins presents a series of paintings and drawings that blur the boundaries between landscape and abstraction, figuration and atmosphere. A Gesture Toward the Earth reflects a lifelong dialogue with place, memory, and the expressive potential of mark and material.
These works are not traditional landscapes. They are responses—intimate, gestural, and layered with time. Hopkins builds each surface with visible tension: pigment, graphite, and ink intertwine in veiled strata, while vertical lines, sweeping contours, and eroded forms suggest both natural structures and human presence.
Drawing and painting are treated as equal forces—sometimes separate, sometimes fused—evoking both the immediacy of sketchbook observation and the weight of the studio process.
The work offers a meditation on impermanence and resilience. Color becomes temperature. Line becomes gesture. Space becomes memory. Whether echoing scorched fields, distant weather, or internal states, Hopkins’ compositions dwell in a place between clarity and dissolution.
“I’m not painting a scene,” Hopkins notes. “I’m painting what remains in the body after the scene is gone.”
This series invites viewers into a visual terrain that is felt as much as seen—where the land, and the act of drawing it forth, become a language of their own.
Contact:
Carolyn DiFiori Hopkins
www.carolyndifiorihopkins.com
gray1carolyn@gmail.com
Carolyn DiFiori Hopkins is a multidisciplinary artist based in Albany, NY. She works in painting, drawing, and mixed media to explore themes of landscape, memory, and resilience.
TITLE
A Gesture Toward the Earth # I
Mixed Media on Paper
24 inches x 34 inches
2025
Catalogue
Carolyn DiFiori Hopkins: A Gesture Toward the Earth
In her latest body of work, Carolyn DiFiori Hopkins reaches deeper into the marrow of the land—not to illustrate it, but to inhabit its gestures, to chart its vulnerability, and to draw out the spectral presence of time itself. These paintings—both restrained and ruptured—resist easy categorization. They are not quite landscapes. They are not wholly abstract. They are psychic maps, where natural forms become memory, and color is deployed not as decoration but as temperature, pulse, erosion.
Hopkins, long admired for her rigorous drawing practice and poetic intimacy with nature, here edges closer to the threshold of dissolution. Her vertical strokes—sometimes whisper-thin, sometimes smoldering—function as human stand-ins, or perhaps as the skeletal remains of what once stood. There’s a consistent tension in these compositions: between fragility and strength, emergence and disappearance, surface and depth. One thinks of the aftermath of fire, of standing in a field just after something has ended.
Technically, the work is unapologetically raw. You see the artist’s hand in every swipe, every graphite scratch, every veiled wash. She allows the surface to breathe—resisting the trap of polish. The materials speak. The white space is not absence; it’s a chamber for pause.
At times, the work veers toward the didactic—not in message, but in its formal insistence on pattern, symmetry, or gesture. One might wish for a moment of silence or restraint to interrupt the visual rhythm, to allow a single form or figure to hold the gaze longer. And yet, this slight over-articulation may also be the point: the landscape is not quiet, it is cluttered with memory, resistance, growth, loss.
This is work that demands a slower looking. Hopkins has no interest in spectacle. She builds atmosphere, lets pigment do its wandering, and allows viewers to find themselves in the fog of it.
In an era oversaturated with digital sheen and high-concept detachment, Hopkins reminds us that the hand still matters, that the earth is still worth mourning, and that a tree—rendered with intention—can carry the same weight as a figure.
Entanglegraph: A New Vision in Contemporary Mixed Media
A Press Release from Carolyn DiFiori Hopkins
Albany, NY — June 13, 2025
Multidisciplinary artist and educator Carolyn DiFiori Hopkins introduces a bold new direction in contemporary visual language with the debut of her coined term and body of work: Entanglegraph.
This innovative series of mixed media compositions redefines boundaries between drawing, painting, collage, and digital reflection—offering an intricate visual vocabulary for the Anthropocene.
Over a career spanning four decades, Hopkins has developed a practice rooted in poetic mark-making, intimate materials, and conceptual depth. The Entanglegraph emerged as a formal and emotional response to a fractured world in flux. Each piece—numbered sequentially like field notes—merges graphite, ink, pigment, and digital layering into a surface of tension and tenderness. Natural forms, symbolic gestures, and visual memory converge in these layered works.
“In an Entanglegraph, the act of mark-making becomes an act of stitching time,” says Hopkins.
“These works arise from the ground up—sometimes literally—collecting remnants, textures, and traces that have been rubbed, worn, or buried. They are not collages in the usual sense, but vessels of convergence.”
The Series: Crossing into the Nesting
The first body of work under the Entanglegraph umbrella is titled Crossing into the Nesting. These images explore ground-dwelling forms, bird nests, botanical remnants, and obscured figures. They speak to the fragility and resilience of life in a world of upheaval.
Created in Hopkins’ upstate New York studio, the works are available as limited edition archival prints (24 x 32 inches) on museum-quality Hahnemühle paper. Each is digitally signed and accompanied by poetic field notes.
About the Artist
Carolyn DiFiori Hopkins is a lifelong artist and respected elder voice in the arts community. Her work and teaching span painting, drawing, and mixed media practices. She maintains a strong online presence and continues to challenge cultural assumptions about aging, visibility, and innovation in art.
The Entanglegraph is not just a new term—it’s a call to recognize complexity as a form of beauty, and to find coherence within the tangle.
Media & Exhibition Inquiries:
📧 gray1carolyn@gmail.com
Title: Entanglegraph No. 04 (Crossing into the Nesting)
Mixed media and digital construct on paper
24 x 32 inches — Limited Edition Print
Available
A monarch floats in stillness, flanked by branches and the curved form of a bird. Shadow descends like roots. An intimate, forested encounter between forms.