Won Over By Water

Ask Julie Hop her favorite food, and she'll tell you it's still Cajun pasta from the hole-in-the-wall Coop's Place on Decatur Street in New Orleans. Eureka Springs hasn't changed that.

But moving to the Arkansas Ozarks did change one vitally important thing for Hop, a lifelong artist. She left behind her previously chosen mediums of acrylics and oils and switched to watercolor, all because of a class she took at the Eureka Springs School of the Arts.

Not only is she happier than ever with her work, she's selling it ... and teaching at ESSA ... and hosting a Palette to Palate watercolor evening as part of the community's Fleur Delicious Weekend, an annual event focused on "French-inspired indulgences."

"Eureka Springs makes me think of a quieter New Orleans in some ways," Hop says. Just like the Crescent City, it offers an eclectic blend of food, music and culture that she's come to love.

"I got to Eureka in a really weird way," she says, echoing scores of her predecessors. Her story begins with 10 years spent "waitressing and bar trending and doing my art on the side" in the Big Easy. When Hurricane Katrina was rolling in in August 2005, she was inclined to ignore it. "The hurricane previous to that was a big fat false alarm. But the way it looked toward the last days, I knew I had to get out."

Hop loaded her mother, her boyfriend and his family into the car on the day before the storm hit, and they ran for Dade County, Ga., where her boyfriend had been camping. They rented a cabin and listened to the news of the devastation.

"I couldn't get back there. I didn't have any money, and there were very few places to live anymore. I was homeless," Hop says she realized.

In a twist of fate and kindness, a random couple drove through the park and offered the group a cottage on their property, and Hop put down roots. She began painting large-scale murals and started an after-school and summer art program for kids. It was, she says, a good six years. But her mother, who had relocated to Eureka Springs, was getting older, and Hop decided to move on north. Even though she had a degree in art, she signed up for a class at ESSA -- and then a second and a third and a fourth.

"To me, ESSA is a whole experience," she says. "You come, and you take the art classes with an instructor, but you have several other artists around you for a really intense five days. You're totally immersed, with a lot of ideas going back and forth, a lot of camaraderie... You come away with a lot of new tools. That's the thing I really love about it."

Hop also fell in love with watercolor.

"What I found with watercolor -- the best thing -- is the color and the pigment and how it spreads across the paper with the water. It's so hard to just let go and let it do its thing. I still struggle with that. You have to let go. My work is really splashy and colorful and bordering on abstract at times. The color is what it's about."

Soon, she was working at the school as student coordinator, selling her work at a Eureka Springs gallery and this fall, she'll teach her first watercolor class -- which is already sold out. But students can learn from Hop Thursday at Palette to Palate: Watercolor & Wine Edition at the Basin Park Hotel. The event is being touted as "an evening of wackiness, watercolor and wine."

"It'll be fun," Hop says, suddenly sounding shy. "Even though I am a little nervous."

NAN What's Up on 07/01/2016