If you were to walk into one of Eric Hopkins’ aerial paintings, you would be overcome by weightlessness. Up you would go, feather light, passing the trees, the landscape, mountains. A brisk Maine breeze would nudge you along a chain of pearly clouds in the bluest of skies. And as you looked down on the archipelago of the Fox Islands, you would glimpse the shoreline studio where Hopkins, a North Haven artist, creates canvases so rich with color that the expert, ebullient brushstrokes might be lost in a response of pure delight.

“It’s a wonderful way to explore the islands,” said Helen Fisher, speaking of “Eric Hopkins: Way Points,” a mid-career retrospective exhibition she curated at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland. “If you’ve ever been out there to the islands, you’ll identify with Eric’s work. And if you haven’t, it will give you a good idea of what is out there.”

On the other hand, the show, which runs through July, gives a pretty good idea of what’s in there, in Eric Hopkins, that is.

Born in Bangor and raised on North Haven, Hopkins had an early interest in color and nature. He needs little prodding to tell the story of when, at 4, he caught a codfish with his father, a fisherman, educator and ferry captain between North Haven and Vinalhaven. Young Eric was dazzled pulling the fish off the line, its tones sparkling in the bold sun. He cherished it. But by the time he got home, the fish had turned dull with lifelessness. To restore its beauty, and perhaps to add a little of his own, Hopkins took out a paintbrush and painted the fish to present to his mother.

She threw it out later, but something clicked in the boy’s young mind. He went to an empty sheet of paper and filled it with the imagery of the fish. It was his first consciously crafted painting.

“It is a metaphor for the creative process,” said Hopkins. “Ever since then, I’ve been putting myself in positions to have great experiences so I can do something with them.”

One of those experiences has been learning to fly a plane, a visual template for his signature paintings. More broadly speaking, Hopkins has been on a quest to explore the idea of movement through space – on a boat, in a plane, by foot. It’s a notion that settled into his thoughts in 1969, the year he graduated from Rockland High School and a defining period for NASA’s Apollo program. Rapt, Hopkins watched on TV as Apollo missions circled and then landed on the moon. A giant step for mankind, it was also an aesthetic awakening for him.

Soon after, he left the island and embarked on a zigzag path through art school, including stops at the University of Southern Maine, Montserrat School of Visual Arts in Beverly, Mass., Marlboro College in Vermont, and finally, Rhode Island School of Design in Providence.

It was at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts on Deer Isle where a particular interest in glass began, however. Technically, Hopkins was employed as a night watchman in 1972, but during the day he took advantage of the studios and was inspired to make a bowl for his 100-year-old great-grandmother. There was no looking back.

Hopkins calls the piece a “lumpy blob of a bowl” in “Discovery: Fifty Years of Craft Experience at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts” (available this summer through University of Maine Press). But he credits the moment as a turning point in his career. And while Hopkins may be better known among the students that year as the guy who sounded the bell in the middle of the night so everyone could see the Northern Lights, it was the lumpy blob that would hurl him toward Rhode Island School of Design and influential studies with Dale Chihuly, one of the leading experimenters in the glass art field. Hopkins’ technique of making abstracted shell forms from blown glass established him as a force in the avant-garde world. He had shows in New York and still has work in the permanent collection at Corning Museum of Glass in New York.

Eventually, the ever-restless Hopkins branched out even more, experimenting with glass the way Jackson Pollock had with paint. He flung hot molten glass into the air and when it landed on particleboard, it created fluid designs. He called the technique “pyrographics,” and took it on the road.

Literally. In the 1970s, Hopkins built a mobile molten glass studio and traveled the East Coast doing workshops called “Hot Glass Happenings.” It was performance art at its most innovative, with Hopkins flinging the liquid glass to saxophone and flute tunes.

“The ’70s were a wild and wooly time in glass,” said Stuart Kestenbaum, executive director of Haystack, where Hopkins has since taught workshops. “In some ways, Eric’s work mirrors the whole ’60s melting into the ’70s, an open-ended discovery of things for the first time,”

To hear Hopkins tell it, however, success became boring. “I wanted to keep on moving ahead, challenging myself, taking on new ideas,” he said. The artistic pursuits could not be sustained and nourished by trends or commercial interests. If he were looking for way points, a nautical term that refers to physical markers on a course, he had found them, and they were leading him home to North Haven. There, he took up the paintbrush once again.

Once back on the island, Hopkins married, inherited two stepchildren and, with his wife Janice, had three more. He opened his own gallery, took flying lessons, observed the shells, trees, tides and changes. In short, he engaged in an artistic universe of his own making.

“It’s interesting that Eric turned his back on the extreme avant-garde and came back to his first love as a child, which was painting,” said Christopher Crosman, director at the Farnsworth. “Eric has a national reputation for his sculptural glass. He was one of the creators of that movement. But Eric also has this deep-seated consciousness about raw nature, whether land or sea or sky. He’s not the only artist but he is the most consistent one to work with islands now.”

The largest canvases in the Farnsworth show are 60-inch squares, aerial views over the islands. The most obvious colors are green and blue, but that doesn’t rightfully account for the extensive highlights of yellow, red, purple, and white. Hopkins admits quoting Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Georgia O’Keeffe and Picasso, but the work is unmistakably his own. Some may try to place him in the same room with Yvonne Jacquette, who also paints aerials of Maine. But the main quality Hopkins and Jacquette share is that each has a distinct voice, one that can surely converse in the same room but that would never be mistaken for the other tonally.

The overall effect in the most recent Hopkins paintings, some of which were made as recently as March, is a sense of gliding, of being heaven-bound and light. And happy. Which is how Hopkins comes across in person. He’s a “vibrant, real person,” said Helen Fisher. “He makes gestures and noises that are dynamic. It’s a case of the artist really speaking through his canvases.”

Hopkins, who referred to the Farnsworth show as “a major compilation, the best of, the top 10 in my album,” is always in motion. He is, much like the astronauts who fascinated him as a teen, constitutionally disposed to moving his body through space.

“I think a lot about being on a blue ball, on a globe in a vast dark space,” said Hopkins.

He speaks readily of the influences on his art: the space missions, land and sea, educational mentors, jazz, the Rockland artists Louise Nevelson and Andrew Wyeth, whose works he observed growing up. But he also talks of his 5-year-old brother who fell off the family dock and drowned in 1961. To make a psychological stab, one might say that those aerial views are Hopkins’ way of depicting Stephen’s view from heaven.

The Farnsworth show also includes several of the glass works, a few wooden sculptures and more than 50 canvases primarily depicting Maine, but there are also other way points, including Manhattan and New Mexico, from the artist’s journey so far.

Hopkins sometimes wonders if his all-encompassing landscapes and seascapes sometimes look too simple, too basic to the average viewer. Hopkins describes his childhood on North Haven as “basic,” but it’s clear he senses the presence of profundity amid simplicity. The paintings, said Crosman, have that same syntactical tension. They look easy, he explained, “but they are more sophisticated and complex than they look. They have the quality of being light-hearted, but it’s all connected to his childhood and his experiences.”

“I hope people get that,” said Hopkins. “They are used to seeing more traditional paintings. But after they see mine, they go see a sunset or a cloud, or they see spruce trees and they say: ‘That’s an Eric Hopkins tree!’ Well, it’s not my tree. But I’m presenting them with a vision and they get it.”

“Eric Hopkins: Way Points” will run through July 27 at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland. For information, call 596-6457.