Additional Images

Provenance:

Galerie de Bellefeuille, Montreal, QC;
Private Collection, Toronto, ON

Note:

When Waddington’s received this consignment, we reached out to the artist’s children, Anna and Jacob Hopkins for their thoughts on this painting:

This is a great example from a series which he worked on throughout his career iterating on themes and icons like fruit, water, and space. These elements often dancing between confinement and freedom. These pieces often evoke sensorial memories for us. The smell of oil paint and turpentine. The hot and humid Montreal summer nights. That mix of scent, and the image of these refreshing watermelons, brings us back to the summer evenings with our dad when he would paint in his studio. Whether we were doing homework, painting something ourselves, or just lounging in the heat, we can almost feel the warm breeze coming through the huge windows. You can see the Turcot interchange from those windows, almost, as his studio was in an old factory in St. Henri, right on the edge of the winding concrete structure. In this painting, you can feel a sense of this kind of concrete jungle on the horizon, offset by the natural refreshing beauty of the fruit. While writing this with my brother, this painting really brought us back to those evenings, and the oasis that our father's studio was, amongst the urban sprawl of the summer city night, right outside those windows.

Anna Hopkins is an actor and screenwriter based in Toronto, and Jacob Hopkins is a photographer, carpenter and film tech based in Montreal. Whenever they can, they love to collaborate together. Waddington’s thanks Jacob and Anna for their contribution.