Clyde Hopkins: Painting on Paper (Blackbird Books)Like Matt Lippiatt, one of the contributors to this volume, I can struggle to ‘place’ Clyde Hopkins’ paintings in relation to art history and popular culture. Although I have known of Clyde Hopkins’ paintings for several years (unlike Lippiatt, who came across an Instagram image in 2018), he has always been a rather peripheral and unknown artist to me. Hopkins’ work gradually moves from an exploratory, often splashy and gestural, abstraction towards more formal and subtle compositions, which contrast stippled and ‘busy’ areas with both flat colour and looser drawn lines, stripes and splashes. Key goes on discuss how these associations help hold initially disparate sections together within a painting, and also uses the metaphor of a river’s ebb and flow, how it exists in many differing states. Hopkins’ work is not, of course, a linear sequence, nor was he prone to working in series, but there is a gradual sense of movement towards clarity and tentative resolution.