Annamieka Hopps
Portland, OR
Painter in Portland, Oregon specializing in commissioned portraits of beloved people, pets, plants, and places. Art made to celebrate what you hold dear.
Message
Annamieka Hopps is a painter and professional artist mentor in Portland, Oregon.
Annamieka is the product education specialist at Artwork Archive, where she teaches artists worldwide how to organize, sustain, and share their creative careers. She also works with private clients as an artist mentor, where she specializes in helping her clients express their ideas, pluck out the gems, and polish them up so they can see their own brilliance. She earned her BFA from the University of Oregon in 2007. She helps artists write artist statements, obtain grant funding, publish books, get featured in publications, launch collections, and begin entirely new chapters in their creative careers.
When she’s not working on new videos at Artwork Archive or meeting with her own archiving clients, she's busy documenting her own twenty years of work and dreaming up what's next. Getting together with people and making art is her favorite thing so she offers live portrait painting sessions, hosts collaborative art retreats, and paints murals in the streets with her neighbors. She's in a busy season of parenting and she's known for being that one mom sketching figure studies while watching the school play. She loves her people and believes art and friendship are both about showing up, even when the kitchen’s a mess.
Statement
Making art has always been a source of some serious magic in my connections with other people.
My process is simple: I paint and talk to people. Sometimes I paint them live, sometimes from photos or video, often while recording our conversations. Even if I'm painting nature or making something completely abstract I'm usually thinking about people in my life and they make it into the piece. To make the art, I work with oil sticks, acrylic paint, drawing materials, paper, wood and sculptural materials.
Whether I’m painting a person, a flower, a dog, or a waterfall, I aim to capture not just its likeness but its personality, too. I often begin with something recognizable, and then follow curiosity into pattern, color, and imagination. I like a lot of visual variety in each piece. I teach artists basic design and I get very nerdy when balancing my composition - the artwork feels very free yet it's built upon a solid foundation of theory and twenty years of practice. Ideally, when I'm done, it's balanced and brimming with messy exuberance; ready to bring some life to the walls it inhabits next.