Chris Hopkins, Mukilteo

For artist Chris Hopkins, retirement is largely a technicality.

“I’m retired on paper,” Hopkins said. But as long as people continue commissioning his work – and as long as he enjoys creating it – he has little intention of putting down his brushes.

Hopkins is perhaps best known for a commercial illustration career that included artwork connected with “Return of the Jedi,” “Labyrinth,” “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,” album covers and Super Bowl theme art. But those projects are decades behind him, and Hopkins would rather talk about what he’s doing now.

His more recent work has focused on fine art and telling stories of perseverance and history. Among his major projects is a series of more than 60 works honoring the Tuskegee Airmen, documenting the Black pilots, ground crews, and families who confronted enemies overseas and racial discrimination at home.

Another series examines the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, including paintings depicting Bainbridge Island newspaper publishers Walt and Milly Woodward, who used the Bainbridge Review to oppose the forced removal of their Japanese American neighbors.

Hopkins also has a long association with the U.S. Air Force Art Program. His assignments took him to Afghanistan as a combat artist and later to Walter Reed, where he sketched wounded service members.

More recently, he completed a portrait of former Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall for the National Gallery.

Hopkins works primarily in oils these days, although he has experimented with resin and encaustic. Through it all, his philosophy remains remarkably simple: Keep learning.

He considers himself a “lifetime student,” and when asked to name his favorite painting, Hopkins offered an answer that helps explain why retirement holds little appeal.

That painting, he said, is probably still somewhere in the future. n