Meet the artist
Greetings and salutations! This website is home to Crow Creative and the heart-crafted creations by designer, artist and maker Julie Hopkins.
Biography
Introduction
Hello and thank you for stopping by. I create digital collages mixing modern and vintage photography and illustrations.
I was trained as a Graphic Designer in Toronto, Canada. I have worked for the last 20 years primarily as a web designer and project manager, while flexing my print design/production and branding skills. Over the course of my career, I have spent thousands of hours working with and manipulating various kinds of still and moving images. I bring these skills and techniques when crafting my collage art.
Way finding
In 2005, I began VJing with a group of local artists and friends at a number of smaller collaboratively organized music events in Halifax, Nova Scotia. This lead to video mixing at music festivals, clubs and dance events across eastern Canada from Nova Scotia, to Québec and Ontario.
VJing lead me to a deeper connection with collage. I discovered how intuitive layering, synchronization, iconography and archetypal imagery could expand the energy of the music and encourage movement and freedom through dance. Collage opened a pathway into an interior world and a window into my subconscious. It also offered me a meaningful outlet for creative expression that was free from the confines of commercial design work.
Portrait.
Thank you Deena Rich for the b&w photo. I couldn’t help myself and collaged it up :.
Mission - Artist Statement
Primary Mission: To contribute to the universe by living from the heart, with integrity, compassion and co-operation. To celebrate and promote a resilient, cohesive and enchanted world.
Professional Mission: To celebrate and cultivate love, joy and peaceful coexistence through heart-crafted creations inspired by wild landscapes and mystical experiences.
Art as Healer
Art carries us out of the day-to-day and offers alternate experiences and perspectives. When we encounter art we are invited to transcend our own emotional states and give voice to our internal worlds. Art heals, elevates and leads us into transformation and deeper connection.
Art & music bring me joy, meaning, inspiration, and connection. I turn to collage as way to process, reflect, express and understand life. I feel very alive and meditative when listening to music while layering images in a collage or constructing and sewing.
It is my wish that my collage art, in their many incarnations, activates and cultivates love, hope and surrender.
Process & play
Each collage is a celebration of life and a dance with intuition, the imaginal and the subtle energies. They are an invitation to journey out of the everyday into wonder, vulnerability and union. The collages act as a portal to unique expressions of love and to vibrant energetic and emotional exchanges.
I fuse and blend images by colour, texture and subject and through layering and masking to create a new cohesive story. My art is informed and shaped by many influences including philosophy, music, dance, astrology, myth, mysticism, liminal spaces, and wild places. The ingested ideas, energies, information and imagery find their way, consciously and subconsciously into a visual language of layered and textured collages.
I have expanded from art that hangs on a wall to wearable art. I have merged my design and production skills with my passion for collage, hand-crafting and sewing. I have created a series of hand-made, one-of-a-kind, upcycled bags. I also have been working with a small and sustainable manufacturer in Montreal to produce journals and other textiles.
I am inspired by the pleasure, learning and challenge in transitioning my digital collage art into something that you can touch and feel. I hope to offer a more sympathetic, moving and connected experience and to continually improve and refine my processes and techniques.
Why a crow?
Crows are found all over the world in all kinds of habitats. They are adaptable, community minded, problem-solvers and adept communicators. I hope to invoke these traits and their harmonious, playful and mystical energies into my creative life and collage art.
Crows also hold a special place in my heart. They are guides and guardians that help me to connect with a sense of awe and mystery. Crows first catalyzed a life long interest and exploration into the weird through visionary experiences, synchronicity, deja vu, and prophetic dreams.
I do believe in an everyday sort of magic — the inexplicable connectedness we sometimes experience with places, people, works of art and the like; the eerie appropriateness of moments of synchronicity; the whispered voice, the hidden presence, when we think we’re alone.“