There is a picture of Edward Hopper in which an empty room is seen through which noon light enters. A critic asked him what he was looking for with that work and he replied: “Myself.” Hopper did not paint what he saw but … How I saw it. He believed that art serves to capture a mood, not to reflect reality. His painting is misleading to the extent that his realism hides a mystery that is never revealed to the viewer. He was a lonely, sullen person, self -absorbed in creation. As his wife’s newspapers reflect, he spent days in silence and was terribly egocentric. He was not interested in the others, he only cared to paint. He used days and even weeks imagining how his paintings would be and planning to the lower details.
In his first stage, Hopper painted Gloucester buildings, where he lived with his wife. I never represented people. I was obsessed with the light and the geometry of the representation. His works were evolving. When he moved to New York he began painting people in bars, cinemas and in hotels.
It has been said that Hopper is the portraitist of loneliness. It is true because those individuals of their paintings are alone or do not interact. In ‘Nighthawks’, his most notorious work, we see three people in the bar of a bar through a crystal. They are in front of a waiter and there is a door that takes to the kitchen. We do not know who they are, what do they do or why they are there. The scene produces a feeling of desolation, such as the image of a dream.
Hopper was a tormented creator, given to the bursts of violence and arisco with his neighbors. I had no friends. He barely spoke and was unable to express feelings outside his intimate environment. He liked to go to the movies and from there probably arose many of his paintings. Hitchcock fascinated and inspired him. There is consensus in which Hopper, born in a wealthy class family and with a puritan education, is the largest American painter of the twentieth century. Many of his images have contributed to the iconography that we identify today with the American “way of life.” He was sincere when he said that painting is the search for oneself. His paintings are transparent. They are born from their unhappiness, of their dissatisfaction, of an inner suffering that emerges in the images that come out of their brush. His misfortune was the source of his creativity.
What I like most about their paintings are the details that only emerge if one concentrates on contemplation. It portrays a woman with a white dress leaving a house and it is difficult to perceive her leg outlined through the skirt. You have to look a lot to realize. “The inner life is full of shadows,” he said. And that is what he painted: the shadows of his tormented soul.
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