I remember the first time I saw Nighthawks, it was during one of the random midnight wanderings on the internet, I was trying to educate myself on art, back when I was solely a science person trying to make a case for art among my people. Most of what came up didn’t make any sense at all. Art seemed too obscure and needing some sort of abstract level of sorcery for comprehension. If Nighthawks spoke to me that night, I can’t remember that now, but most probably it did not. Then things changed as they always do.
A friend once said Books were the internet before there was the internet and spending an evening at the library scanning through shelves of books the equivalent of getting lost in endless hyperlinks. One such day at the art section of city library I got pulled into Edward Hopper’s art. For reasons hard to explain, most of the paintings made me really uncomfortable, it felt as though one shouldn’t be looking at those paintings in public. It was not nudity though, yes, there is a lot of it in Hopper’s paintings, but they were far from being sensual or erotic. It felt as if you got access to an invisibility cloak and you are walking from apartment to apartment catching people at their most vulnerable moments.
Out of all his works the one that struck a chord was the summer interior. It might have been the complete absence of a dark winter night or an overcast day that usually comes to an artists palette when trying to pin down loneliness in a painting or the playful use of color to mark the lights and shadows or the perspective from which it is drawn- which makes you the viewer completely helpless in front of a lone broken human being. The fact that suicide rates peak in spring/ summer, might seem perplexing to a whole lot of us, perhaps this painting answers that partly or begin to answer it?
Extreme loneliness can drive a person to their limits. Today with this omnipresent connectivity I wonder if it possible to get through an adulthood without feeling utterly lonely at some point in our lives? Also, is loneliness one of those human experiences that is hard for one to empathize with when one is no longer experiencing it? Perhaps to an extent, certainly going through it would make one more tolerant towards another human who might be caught within the walls of it, but does no longer being there or the selective amnesia that comes with surviving an utterly lonely period make one think of another person going through it as being self- indulgent or having brought it on themselves?
Perhaps that is where Hopper’s paintings are important. A connection that you feel with his paintings, even if momentarily can remind you of the helplessness that is brought on with extreme loneliness. The feeling of being completely walled in. On the other hand, looking at his paintings while being walled in could make one feel less lonely because you get to see that in this abyss of loneliness you are not alone.
Hopper was good at stripping down a painting to its bare necessities and going through several of his paintings lets you see that he manipulated several archetypes repeatedly (consciously or unconsciously). Can you imagine Hopper sitting in his one-room apartment in Newyork city fighting the wave of abstraction that was taking over the art world with his utterly unromanticised realism?
The flipside of having a curiosity gene is that no detail on life and art of Hopper would escape my attention. If you come to disregard an artist as a person, can you still look at the art the same way? That is a discussion for another day. But for every painting of Edward Hopper that we have known to love there are countless hours of Jo Hopper’s life that went unaccounted for. Perhaps that is also for another day.
But getting to know Jo and her life (what is documented of it) made me look at Summer Interior and see only a woman where in my previous encounters the gender seemed insignificant.