Art talk.

Who was the first artist you remember being influenced by?

This week I’m spotlighting mine:

Edward Hopper.

I first discovered Hopper when reading Olivia Laing‘s The Lonely City, a gorgeous meditation on art better that’s explained here. I remember researching his work and falling down an endless rabbit-hole, losing all track of time. As someone whose favorite days are spent wandering around the city, I was naturally drawn to the lonely city-scapes that he is so famous for depicting. As I looked over more of his work, I fell in love with how he was able to take a mundane moment of life and infuse every inch of it with some larger commentary on the human experience.

Morning Sun (1952)

For example, Morning Sun depicts a woman sitting in a simple, undecorated room, drenched in golden light. She is embracing herself, lost in thought as she gazes out of the window. It is a mundane moment that we all experience every day. However, the canvas is crawling with secrets that we never tell. The look on her face gives us all away. There is this grand, glimmering world out there full of buildings and people and energy and she is gazing upon it with utter exhaustion. She seems hollowed by the thought of facing the metropolis for another day. She’s isolated in her own box while ironically being packed alongside countless other boxes. It is the great paradox of city-life that Hopper explored so mightily throughout his career.

What I find most interesting here is the light. We know it’s morning, which adds a layer of depression when you study the look on the woman’s face. If it were evening light, you could assume that she is tired and reflecting on the day. But because it’s morning, we attach a hopeful connotation to it. Her expression disrupts that connotation, disrupting our conditioned perceptions of how we are supposed to feel about a new day.

It’s also worth noting that this is natural light, as opposed to the artificial light that illuminates so many of Hopper’s pieces. Immersed in a metropolis, far removed from wilderness, the sun remains one of the few elements of the earth that can still reach out to her. This adds a layer of depth, where the city is seen as a place that has not only isolated humans from each other, but from the earth as well.

The House by the Railroad (1925)

One of my favorites, Hopper created this piece in 1925 when the landscape of America was rapidly changing. Because of this, it is often interpreted as a commentary on innovative change, represented by the railroad, disrupting the tranquility of the past, represented by the Victorian home.

And I love that reading. But as a twenty-something just starting my own life, I see this painting on a more individualistic level. The railroad seems to represent the unrelenting, exciting desire to keep moving on and exploring your life. There is an element of danger there, where the vehicle promising to take you places is also one that can kill you. The house then symbolizes the ever-present longing for the comfort of home that follows us throughout our lives; the longing that our desire to explore the world is in constant battle with. We don’t want to leave the warmth and safety of what we know, but the railroad is running through out minds faster all the time. It then becomes a painting of binary opposition, of the comfort of home versus the temptation to abandon it.

Night Windows (1928)

One of my favorite things about visiting Brooklyn was coming home every evening and watching as lights began to illuminate the beautiful brownstone windows all around me. Any city person knows the feeling of sitting on a fire escape and watching as moments of people’s lives flicker on across the street like stolen scenes from a movie. You don’t mean to pry, but there is something poetic about watching this person wash their dishes. You don’t mean to be nosy, but the couple dancing in the living room are too in love for you to look away. You don’t mean to, but you can’t help wanting to climb down the fire escape and join the dinner party happening below. You know the feeling. You’re alone, but you’re also so not.

That’s why I love this painting. You see a partial figure, engaged in some mundane activity, but you also see you whole world reflected in her stance. She is just being a human, like you. The restless curtain reveals the open window, suggesting a mixing of the outside with the inside; with her life and yours. Again, there is an element of isolation, but there is also one of community. We all inhabit our little boxes, moving though the same motions of life every day, forgetting all the while that when seen from the outside, it all looks a little like art.

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