34 “When you put us in nature we’re very tiny,” artist Janette Hopper says. Her exhibit entitled “To the Cloud! Vaporware,” is the third chapter in a six-month exhibition, “Dancing Through My Blogosphere,” and features oil paintings focused on clouds. Her clouds were inspired by the Carolina skies in Robeson County and clouds around the world. Hopper, a regional artist, currently resides in Wilmington. “I’ve been a regional artist so many places,” she says. “...You don’t know what the sky looks like until you go there.” A retired arts professor from the University of North Carolina Pembroke, Hopper has been teach-ing art since the 1970s. Beginning in Denmark on a Fulbright Scholarship, her “Danish Boats” became a diptych painting inspired by the Port of Skagen at Europe’s northernmost point. In Hopper’s painting, tiny workmen are dwarfed by the gigantic expansion of the sky and clouds. With painterly realism, her oil canvases are fluid and tex-tural. Color, movement, gesture and composition are the most important qualities to the creation of space. “Without movement in a landscape it’s kind of dead. It’s amazing what colors exist in nature if you really look,” Hopper says, pointing out the window. In “The Old Place,” the road holds a linear perspective that affects lightness and depth perception. As the viewer gets further away, the edges get softer and the colors become dimmer. The reflection of s k y ’ s t h e l i m i t Clouds By Amber Adams Photography by Allison Potter Janette Hopper in her Wilmington studio. WBM june 2014
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