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Quote of the Day: Painting Sunlight
“All I wanted to do is paint sunlight on the side of a house.” — Edward Hopper
Edward Hopper would rather paint than talk. Throughout his life, he remained stoic and introverted, allowing his work to speak more than he was willing. Hopper’s paintings show quiet moments of solitude, usually revealing melancholy somewhere between the oil and canvas.
His most famous work is “Nighthawks,” a diner scene that has been reproduced and parodied countless times. It’s hard not to look at each painting and try to figure out what the subjects are thinking. Small subjects lost in thought amid the largeness of nature and the city.
A friend of mine, and fellow fan of Hopper’s, was asked for one of those interminable artist’s statements to post at the entrance of his first gallery exhibition. Instead of 2,500 words discussing “the juxtaposition of the timeless and majestic elegance of nature’s sensory-surpassing miracles with the entangled and growing tensions of our time in culturally reconnecting with the shift away from the human condition of love,” he got straight to the point:
“I don’t write. I paint.”
Hopper would have smiled.
A few more examples of Hopper’s work:
It’s a joke, Son. I couldn’t help it at the time.
I read once that the secret to Hopper’s ability to evoke that ineffable melancholy resided in his perspective lines: they didn’t track. They resolved to inconsistent points. The second painting in Jon’s gallery suggests an example.
Whether this was by design, or a consequence of intuition, I don’t know.
Like Cezanne?
I suspect that it was not by design. Hopper’s skills as a painter were slightly on the primitive side and I think he just didn’t know or care that much about perspective, though I don’t see anything so out of alignment that it is very noticeable. Here is a Hopper watercolor where the perspective lines and verticals are quite wobbly, but I think if the lines were perfect, that picture would not be as interesting:
When I look at Hopper’s paintings intellectually, I can see many artistic “shortcomings” like his drawing is a little shaky, his colors are often gaudy, his figures are kind of stiff, but despite this (or maybe because of this), his paintings create an appealing mood. The loneliness and obvious 1940’s and 50’s clothing and cultural icons remind me of Film Noir, except with color.
The Reticulator (a close cousin of The Terminator?) made mention of some Russian film genre that I am not familiar with, but I could imagine Sterling Hayden and Veronica Lake in a Hopper painting, smoking cigarettes and sipping on a cocktail in some sleazy bar, and not looking at each other but staring off into space.
Cezanne surely didn’t know much about perspective, or drawing, or painting in general (Ha!) In my not so humble opinion, he didn’t have anything else to make up for his lack of talent. The example you gave above is probably one of his best paintings. Here are some more typical examples of his work, starting with a picture of his wife, and ending with one of the worst nude scenes in art history:
It’s uncanny the way she seems to follow you around the room. And then there’s the eyes.