Kathy Hooper’s father was the first person who told her that being an artist was one of the best things you could do with your life. She agreed then, and she still does, nearly nine decades later.

By all accounts, she is one of those people who was simply born an artist.

“It’s not something that Kathy does–it’s just who she is,” said Darren Byers, a sculptor in Sussex who is a friend and collaborator.

Genetics can’t hurt, coming, as she does, from a long line of artistic ancestors. And Wilderkrantz, the South African farm where she spent the best barefoot days of childhood, certainly planted early seeds of the nature-focused lifestyle and artistic practice she still pursues. A little river ran through the property, with its lovely old Dutch house and cows, pigs, chickens, and ducks running about. It was too far for Kathy and her sister to go to school, so they didn’t, “thank goodness.”

“Free from school and mostly free from discipline and adults, I absorbed everything without really knowing what I was doing,” Hooper wrote in the Family Book, an illustrated narrative volume she made for each of her children. “Plants, insects, animals, rivers, and streams, fields and roads, the mountain, house and barns. Nothing was separate, all was wonder and a beginning.”

Her appreciation for nature’s beauty, bounty, and mystery has never left her.

“I’ve always loved the country, and I’m crazy about plants and animals,” Hooper said in an interview with Matt Brown, a Hampton filmmaker who made a short documentary about her in 2023 that I co-produced. “The things that I paint and think about are still very much those sorts of things.”

Some artists find themself at art school. Hooper wasn’t one of them. After high school and studies at Rhodes University, she headed to London’s Central School of Art. It was well-known and respected, but, as Hooper says, “it wasn’t right for me at all.”

She felt pressured by the teachers to suit her work to their styles and ideas.

“I didn’t want to do that half the time,” she said. There wasn’t enough space “to get on with” the work she wanted to do.

She dropped out after a year and a half, but not before meeting John Hooper, a talented young English sculptor finishing his studies at the Royal College of Art, in 1954. They fell in love, and after graduation, he followed her back to South Africa, travelling by cattle boat because it was all he could afford. His arms ached for weeks from the milking.

They married, and the oldest three of their four children–Sue, John T., Rafe, and Tandi– followed in quick order. As the young family grew, the devastation and danger of apartheid, which Kathy and John fought through art and activism, became untenable.

“We began to see we couldn’t live there,” she said. “It was such a feeling of helplessness.”

They went to England but found it small and confining. Kathy’s Canadian mother had told her stories of this snowy land that imbued an image of the country in her daughter.

In 1962, John accepted a job offer to develop art education in the Saint John school system, and the family crossed the pond to New Brunswick.

“We bought this beautiful piece of land,” Hooper told Brown, “and I’ve lived here ever since.”

Over the years, the 40-acre property atop a hill in Hampton has grown into a Hooper family compound. Tucked away behind an edenic garden beside the bright yellow farmhouse are Kathy’s and John’s studios, and their son Rafe also built his family’s home on the land. There are tangles of tended gardens near the homes, but mostly, the land is untouched and feels gloriously wild.

“There’s a couple of trees up the back that I love, and now I see they’re beginning to get really old,” Hooper told Brown. “I’m beginning to think they look like they’re going to maybe die. And it makes me very sad. But that’s what goes on. That’s life.”

In the more than six decades since the 1960s when she arrived in the province, Hooper has cut a singular path in New Brunswick art: a white woman who immigrated from Africa working in a dizzying array of mediums with a distinct visual style, building a home and raising a family, fighting, in her quietly powerful way, for environmental and human rights, and making space for others to connect to their creativity and community.

Her energy is legendary. Tandi Hooper-Clark, the youngest of the four Hooper kids, remembers her mother tending to the farm, planting and harvesting crops in their massive garden, milking the cow each morning, digging a pond, all the while making art.

“It’s just pure commitment,” said Tom Smart, a curator and writer who retired from the director’s role at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in 2024. He got to know John and Kathy in the ‘90s, when he first came to New Brunswick.

“She has this kind of vigorous energy that goes into everything she does,” Smart said. “When you’re talking to her, there is that curiosity, intelligence, and intensity that always translates into her work. It is a seamless interaction between who she is and what she does.”

“To see her art is to know the woman.”

Hooper’s body of work is sprawling, immense. It spans thousands of drawings and hundreds of paintings in oil, acrylic, and watercolour in a wide range of subjects and styles.

“There’s this diversity of investigation,” said Peter Larocque, Head of the Humanities Department and Art Curator at the New Brunswick Museum. “You can see her mark-making language, in terms of drawing a particular way or how she breaks up space and looks at it. So you can recognize that in her work, even though the subject matter might be wildly different.”

Her varied and numerous series demonstrate her willingness to explore. Some, such as the Strong Women Series she began in the 1970s and continued working on into the 2000s, are more figurative and explicit in their ideas.

Others are more ambiguous and open to interpretation, a gut-sense reaction, such as the Dog Series, inspired by the resourcefulness, dignity and “wholeness” of strays she saw on the streets of Mexico, where she used to go every year for a couple of months.

“I used the dogs as a metaphor for a lot of what I think humans go through: pain, loneliness, fun, hunger, and the will to survive,” Hooper explained in the catalogue for Invisible Worlds, a 2010 exhibition at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery.

Others are deeply personal. The John Series, following her husband’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis, shows him in different spaces, “still strong but away from me,” as she told CreatedHere magazine.

“John was a huge presence; he was my guide often, my critic, and my most beloved human,” she said in the Invisible Worlds text. They were partners in life and art. Kathy selected the colours and painted many of his wooden sculptures, which she and Sue continue to preserve. Her grief at his illness and death, in 2006, was staggering.

“The pain is enormous,” she told the Telegraph-Journal in 2005. “It colours everything.”

Hooper manifests that internal, invisible experience in her sketchbook and canvases.

“She paints her feelings,” said Sue Hooper, Kathy’s eldest daughter, who is also a visual artist.  “She is very honest. There weren’t many concerns about what other people thought.”

In an undated journal entry, Hooper muses how “muddled thoughts” become lines and colours.

“So now I am calmer, and the paintings reflect it. They are as definite, I think, but in a simpler way. They are not as passionate or demanding,” Hooper wrote. “I think I am getting to see what sort of person I am more clearly.”

There’s an inherent trust, a giving over, that happens.

“The special moments —when your best work happens— is when you allow the painting to take over,” Hooper told Christina Sabat in a 1990 newspaper column. “The painting becomes you.”

Laroque appreciates her comfort with ambiguity, the gutsiness of her exploration. “She’s not afraid of the unknown,” he said. “A lot of artists do what they know. I like that sense of mystery in her work.”

Along with paintings, Hooper has done different types of printmaking and worked in clay and textiles. But always, at the base of her practice, there is drawing.

“The angels touched her when it comes to drawing,” Smart said. “Drawing at this highest level is almost pure thought. She’s not held back by technique. She’s thinking the image onto the paper.”

This foundational act–ritual, even–that she still does most days is guided by instinct.

“Half the time, I don’t know what I’m doing, honestly,” Hooper told Matt Brown.

She trusts that feeling, that instinct, to start a line and see where it goes. Sometimes, arriving in her studio, she’ll have a sense of what she wants to do; some days, not. “Those are sometimes the best days,” she says.

When Kathy was a girl, her father built a playhouse for her and her sister. The little girls loved decorating the interior and played with it constantly. One night, they left it out in torrential rain, and the thin plywood wrinkled and warped.

At first, the sisters cried and cried. But when they looked again at the playhouse ruins, they laughed. “I can’t tell you what a shambles it was, really, but it was good in some ways too,” she said. That early comfort with imperfection, a willingness to let go, stayed with her.

“I really do think I’m lucky because I don’t feel afraid of doing stuff that doesn’t look completely right yet.”

Kathy Hooper’s creativity is not limited to her studio. It’s tentacular and innate, infusing how she makes a home, cultivates a garden, hosts a dinner, and gets involved in a cause.

“One of the things that inspired me, that I learned from Kathy, was a level of creativity that extends to everything,” said Beth Powning, the New Brunswick author. She and her husband, Peter Powning, the multidisciplinary artist, met the Hoopers when they moved from the U.S. to rural Markhamville in the 1970s. The ex-pat artist couples became fast friends.

“As a team, they were community builders. They were just a social centre. They got things going, inspired people and had a lot of fun,” Peter said. “There was always an element of play.”

For Hooper, this sense of art as a way of being, rather than a job, is essential. “It’s not a career,” she told Matt Brown, “I see the word ‘career’ as the kind of person who’s shooting ahead for his boss to give him a better chance.”

Her work has always been in service to creative impulses, not commercial pressures. “She’s never been one to do something because it would sell,” Tandi said. “And she definitely could have done that.” She recalls her mother turning down a gallerist’s suggestion that she paint more of a highly saleable series of landscapes. “She just does what she wants to do.”

The money-making Hooper missed out on was compensated by the integrity and freedom it earned her.

“I have never been an ambitious person, and I think perhaps my ‘career’ has suffered from this,” Hooper said in CreatedHere. “But on the other hand, I have always been able to paint and do whatever I wanted to without worrying about what people thought of my work, trying to get galleries, et cetera.”

Even if one doesn’t call it a career, her resume has all the bona fides of an active, acclaimed artist. She is the first woman and fourth artist to receive the Strathbutler Award (John Hooper was, in 1991, the inaugural recipient), one of the province’s highest honours in the visual arts.

Her art is in public and private collections worldwide, including eight in the National Art Bank. And her advocacy and effort to help build a provincial arts infrastructure continue to benefit New Brunswick artists.

A member of the Premier’s Advisory Committee for the Arts from 1986-89, she was a catalyst in forming the New Brunswick Arts Board. She served on the Advisory Board of the Canada Council Art Bank and has participated in national and provincial juries.

“She was absolutely committed to the value of arts and society,” Smart said. “She saw, by supporting and advocating strongly for the importance of the arts, she could make a difference and mobilize her community.”

When John got sick, Hooper found a new way to create community. She and Sue started Art at Hooper Studios in John’s workspace, creating a place where emerging and amateur artists could explore their creativity and develop artistic skills through workshops and lessons and where established artists could show their work. The venture formalized the invitation to play and create, which was always open at the Hoopers’.

“We had friends who were always excited to come to our house because we always did some kind of art,” Sue said. “I will run into people, and they’ll still talk about it. It stayed with them.”

Some projects invited others to collaborate. In the late 1980s, Hooper received a Canada Council Creation Grant to work with a group of women to create a collection of embroideries based on her paintings of the Kennebecasis River. The project provided a layered, collective, feminist way of documenting and exploring the area’s changing landscape and climate.

Darren Byers, a Sussex-based sculptor, has worked alongside Hooper on several projects, including the restoration of Credo, a sculpture designed by John honouring Hampton’s John Peters Humphrey, author of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that is installed in the centre of town.

“It’s the feeling you have when you’re there with Kathy, the acceptance and the encouragement,” Byers said. “She’s just so giving. I can honestly say I wouldn’t have crafted the work I have or be the person I am if Kathy had not been a part of my life and the lives of our family. She is such a positive role model.”

“I am not very keen on exhibitions,” Kathy Hooper told Matt Brown in the lead-up to Mountains of Wonder and Tangles of Truth: Kathy Hooper, a retrospective, her sweeping 2023 solo show, curated by Amy Ash, a Saint John artist, writer, and curator who grew up in Hampton. “I really do feel awkward about them quite often.”

The wide-ranging yet concise exhibition occupied the entire main floor of the Saint John Arts Centre, where it opened in October before moving, in 2024, to the Andrew and Laura McCain Gallery in Florenceville-Bristol, then onto the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton.

The works ranged from large canvases to smaller works on paper, ceramic and wooden sculptures, painted furniture, sketchbooks, and journals. Tandi was struck, upon entering, by the depth and breadth of her mother’s work and the delight of seeing pieces she’d long forgotten about, including a carved wooden carousel horse that used to be in the family living room.

Ash, who worked on the show for two years through multiple studio visits with Hooper and conversations with friends, family and colleagues, chose works that capture Hooper’s “inner magic.”

“However tangled, however inhospitable, upsetting, or ugly, Hooper has made a beautiful life of seeking truths,” she wrote in the curatorial essay.

When Tom Smart saw the show, he was struck by the “wide-spectrum creative plurality” on display, along with the deepening of Hooper’s “virtuosity.”

“You just get a powerful voice that becomes more powerful,” he said. “I saw that a deeper kind of humanity infused the work because of her sensibilities, her sensitivity, her gifts, her talent, and her honesty.”

Hooper’s work contains the central tensions of life that give it texture and depth: joy and pain, whimsy and seriousness, work and play, family and self, beauty and horror. Tandi sees the polarities in her mother’s work, not in opposition, but in balance. “Darkness is there,” Tandi said. “And light is there also.”

Beth Powning spoke, in an interview with Brown, of the beyond-words, essential parts of a person that art concretizes. “That’s the mystery, and she’s made it, she’s created it, and now we can feel that,” Powning said. “That’s what people will take away, that essence of Kathy Hooper.”