At Liberty Arts Collective will host a July exhibit of abstract works by Bend artist and Central Oregon Community College art professor William “Bill” Hoppe. The show opens with a reception at 6 p.m. Thursday. It will also be on view during First Friday Gallery Walk, the monthly event in Bend featuring openings, music, wine and more.

As the exhibit title — “Bill Hoppe: Paintings and Paper Projects 1970–2017” — indicates, some of the works in the show date back nearly 50 years to Hoppe’s early days as an artist. Born in Wisconsin in 1945, Hoppe worked as a studio artist in locales such as San Francisco and Seattle before moving to Bend 18 years ago to raise his daughter. He’s exhibited in numerous group and solo shows, and his works reside permanently in dozens of public collections, including the Seattle Art Museum and Portland Art Museum. You’ll find Hoppe’s work in corporate collections from Microsoft to the Weyerhaeuser Co.

You won’t have to travel far to see nearly 50 years of his creative output. Hoppe, who was in France last week, told GO! via email that he thinks of the show as “more a bridge than a retrospective.”

“These past works selected for show are from the five-year period of experimental drawing (1975-80), which led to my large-scale paintings,” he said. “The group of oil paintings I started in 2007 continue to explore the elements that first appeared in the ’75-80 drawings. I thought it would enrich the experience of both series to see them together, and the space at At Liberty offered the opportunity.”

“It is always so great to be asked to show,” he added. “I wish for every artist to have the opportunities that I have been given. I always feel like the work isn’t finished until I see people standing in front of it. That’s when the conversation begins.”

As you’ll very likely notice if you attend the opening or catch the show before it closes on July 28, Hoppe frequently incorporates rectangles in his work.

“You’ll see a lot of rectangular shapes in my paintings — and, of course, the canvas is a rectangle itself. I am fascinated by how the rectangle is a space of seemingly infinite reflection and permutation,” he said.

That fascination dates to the mid-1960s, when Hoppe began “establishing points at varying intervals on the edge of the rectangle, connecting the points with line to create a grid, and composing imagery with the resulting planes,” according to his artist’s statement.

For a time, he would shade the grids with varying gradations of gray “to create surface tension and suggest spatial illusions.”

Once he began introducing color to his paintings, Hoppe worked to maintain a sort of transparency in his method, layering color just to the point that it became opaque. Through that method, Hoppe embraced his own missteps, and invited viewers “to see through every stage of each painting’s development down to the initial points and lines,” according to his statement.

Several large-scale works included in this month’s show demonstrate his tendency to think — and paint — big. Hoppe said his fondness for large-scale creations actually began at the movie theater.

“Movies were the first thing to give me a love of scale and the impact it can give to the smallest details,” he said.

“The scratches and specs of dirt on the big screen always stole my attention from the storyline. I always find that a picture that appears to be ‘too big’ is, in my mind, just the right size.”

Hoppe shared what he feels is the best advice he’s picked up over his decades as a working artist: “Accept that the reward is in the pleasure of doing the work,” he said. “Everything else is a windfall.”

Editor’s note: This story has been corrected. In the original version, the day of the reception was misidentified. The Bulletin regrets the error