I write this from a hotel room in Massachusetts,
sitting and thinking about the past three days I have spent driving
around looking for a location that feels like it is nondescript
but is very particular. In other words, I have been searching for
a sense of the American landscape that is linked intrinsically
to Edward Hopper’s vision.
Hopper has been profoundly influential to me as an artist. Emerging
from a distinctly American tradition, Hopper’s work deals
with ideas of beauty, sadness, alienation, and desire. I think
it is now virtually impossible to read America visually without
referring back to the archive of visual images created by artists
who found inspiration in Hopper’s paintings. His art has
shaped the essential themes and interests in the work of so many
contemporary painters, writers, and, above all, photographers and
filmmakers.
His narratives occur in moments that are forever suspended between “before” and “after”–elliptical,
impregnated moments that never really resolve themselves. There
is a deep reservoir of psychological anxieties in his work, a sense
of stories repressed beneath the calm surface. For me, his use
of light makes his paintings feel more psychologically based. In
these very ordinary situations, the light reveals the story and
serves as a narrative code. It provides some possibility of transformation,
giving the paintings a particular theatricality.
Hopper depicts a world that is at the same time beautiful and
sad, familiar and strange, inviting yet ultimately inaccessible.
I think these polarities are at the center of his work and may
indicate why so many artists, including myself, are drawn to it,
again and again.
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