A little bit more about Tom Hopgood
Tom Hopgood is a Scottish artist that moved to Brighton in 2001. He is self-taught and has created work in collage, pen and ink, oils and acrylics. His artwork is often irreverent, subversive and ambiguous. Influences include: Tantric and Taoist art, the William Burroughs/Brion Gysin cut-up method, Jungian symbolism, the early surrealist movement, advertising, shrine building, tarot card imagery, and album artwork from the 60s to the 90s. He is an obsessive image junky and collects thousands of pictures for his collages. The pieces can take anywhere from a few weeks to several months of intense work to complete.
There are two main strands in Tom Hopgood’s collages. He has produced a series based on tarot card themes but with modern references and using the basic themes of LOVERS, DEATH, THE WORLD, etc. as a starting point to create condensed, multi-faceted images. He has also created a series of triptych collages that are arranged vertically to create alternative associations between the separate panels.
Recently, he has been producing large scale pen and ink drawings inspired, in part, by his collage work. These pieces are part of an overall aim to create artwork that contains as many opposing elements as possible within a single picture: ordered compositions mixed with improvised techniques, lowbrow mixed with highbrow aesthetics, real mixed with hallucinatory, complex images mixed with simple patterns.
Or, alternatively, his work could be described as; ‘Imagine if Henry Darger, William Burroughs and Hieronymous Bosch all got pissed on Buckfast and ended up in a car together that was involved in a high speed crash with the resulting human offal glued together to form one barely functional human that was given rehabilitative art therapy once a week by a new age Wiccan called Betty that involved cutting things out from magazines and sticking them down. After about a year the ‘quiet patient’ would probably produce something like this.’