a general statement from Hoskins about his work:

As a visual fine artist, it is customary for me to work abstractly or nonrepresentationally in conventional mixed media; painting and drawing combined. Everything I do is manual. My work is made with old media:  cotton canvas on wood stretchers, paint, drawing media and paper. I paint and draw and make collages. Usually any of this is done in cohesive series but occasionally disparate/anomalous pieces are produced.

Attention is focused upon line and edge, the tactile properties of the material, color and spatial relationships, balance or imbalance; any factors, components, consideration or discernment engaged or enacted during the process of visual composition.

My work really isn't about anything other than actual painting and drawing. It is not rhetorically dependent or reliant upon “content” as its excuse. It could be seen, I suppose, as politically irrelevant; art of itself. At any rate, it is not social engagement.  A friend, observing my work through decades, has remarked of it as "in the act of 'capturing' the amorphous".  -Maybe.

I have no intent in mind other than to make Art. Other than that, there never was A Plan. In short; Exploration and refinement of aesthetic criteria comprise my motivation.

(- or try this canned bit, dug up from 20+ years ago: With stasis at points in the continuum toward ideal attainment, the suggestion of an ultimate presence is the culminating objective, the return to the source of purpose.  My work is not about things, but rather an aesthetic enterprise... as stated in The Drawing Center's Drawing Papers, issue 22, Twelve Views, September 8 - October 20, 2001 )

To suffice: "I just paint'm. I don't explain'm." -the inveterate gist of/from many painters before me

addenda:

With accrued hindsite I can see there has been an evolution in the work, and by now, I am perpetually recirculating or modifying ideas and tendencies from the bag of tricks. 

I don't pay much attention to any gallery "scene" although there was a time when it influenced me more directly than it does now.  Observing from the margins, I see The Art World as not a community at all but rather a milieu of cartels and cabals, privileged ol' boy networks &/or covens of sanctimonious misandrists and genderists, factionally invested swinging dicks and politically advantaged cracked crotch cases, pampered deskilled legions, one trick ponies and the excessively acclaimed, mercenary alliances veiled in a PC guise secured by undermining agents, byzantine gatekeepers, influence peddlers, cavalier academicians gaming The System, getting over, throbbing for job security and benefits packages -and so on. That's artbiz, the same as in The Real World; $ & politics. Even so; they will not succeed in persuading me to hate art or to be ashamed to admit that I too am an "artist". -mh

To gain distance from the Dirty Little Story of the Contemporary Artworld, it may be helpful to consider The Big Picture as stated below by a math genius friend:

To put things in perspective I like to think of the universe's point of view.  If we shrink the universe's lifetime down to a human life span, then a human lifetime similarly shrunk would be about three seconds, and all of recorded human history would be about three minutes.  If we engineered a new species of microbe three minutes ago and each microbe lived about three seconds, would we consider it a tragedy if one only lived 2.5 seconds or a victory if it lived 3.5 seconds?  Or if a bad microbe election outcome meant chaos for the next 0.15 seconds and damage whose echoes lasted another half-second, would that be a big deal from our point of view? -G. Crockett 2017

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Art is art. Everything else is everything else. -Ad Reinhardt