Edward Hopper
Wednesday, July 27, 2005
I've been meaning to get this post up for a while, so here it is:The thing that sticks with me about Edward Hopper is just that, for the most part, he seemed like a pretty normal guy. You always get this sense from mass media that all artists are neurotic, self-destructive eccentrics, but it's obviously not the case. Perhaps it's more interesting to make a movie about Jackson Pollock because he was crazy and drunk, but there are a lot of artists who are simply creative people with good ideas.
I grew up with Hopper, seeing as he's my mom's favorite artist. It's not like we had his prints all over the wall and she gushed about him all the time. I don't think she ever mentioned him to me until i brought him up one day and she said "Yeah, he's my favorite..." My mom had us very early, so after my younger brother was born and we were all in school, she went to Delgado Community College and get herself an Associates Degree in Fine Art. No, there's not much you can do with that. While she was in school she painted a lot, one of which was a copy of the top picture below, Early Sun. When i was a kid i didn't know that it wasn't an original, but eventually it all made sense. Original or not, it was nice to grow up with that painting on the wall.
There seem to be several different camps under which artists fall: those that challenge our notion of reality/society, those that attempt to introduce new ideas into reality (which begs the question, "are there any new stories left to tell?"), and those that illustrate a truth about reality. Certainly there's overlap, and the idea of these "camps" is rather off-the-cuff and in no way definitive, but it sounds like a good rule to go by. Agreed? Fine.
I think that Hopper falls into the latter camp. His work is centered in reality as it is, but depicts an aspect to it that we don't often like to see. They're lonely and melancholy, often without human subjects, but when people are present they appear to be very inert and inside themselves. Hopper's world seems like a very muted place that is full of warmth and life, but it emphasizes our isolation in a world that is meant to be occupied. Mass media tries to convince us that the world is full of adventure, action, beauty and parties, but I think that Hopper is much closer to the truth.
For a while my mom and i had traded, she got to keep one of my drawings and i had her reproduction of this piece, but somehow she ended up keeping both of them.
I love the pea green of the main building, and how the subway entrance and the doors and signs beyond it become one amorphous shape.
To me, this painting is one of his quintessential pieces.
Could a house look less inviting?
I love this watercolor mainly because it reminds me of the huge mansions lining St. Charles Street and the neighborhoods in the Garden District and Uptown New Orleans.
No, it's not James Dean, Humphrey Bogart, Marilyn Monroe and Elvis. (Just having those names on this page is going to get me all kinds of misdirected-directed search results.) It's just a couple of people hanging out at a diner in the middle of the night and an old man working the night shift behind the counter. Makes it much less glamorous; this isn't a private party, it's a group of people all keeping to themselves.
I can't say enough good about Mark Harden's Artchive site. He's got a great bio and assortment of images there.
Of course, there's always the invaluable google image search.
Maybe one of these days i'll put together a list of good art reference sites on the web.
posted by j. Permanent Link
