Ground Swell: Edward Hopper

 
Ground Swell courtesy www.corcoran.org

EDWARD HOPPER REMINDS ME
Each Us Lives a Life Today.  Some will look to the past for wisdom, others will look to the future for hope.  Some will look at Hopper’s urban inflected works like Nighthawks and see desolation, isolation and despair.  Others will see in that diner scene a search for community and hope.  Despair and hope are the American way.  Who hasn’t known desolation and despair?

Who doesn’t yearn for more community and hope?  We cannot fully cut the tethers to our past.  If we succeed in cutting all physical ties, some strange psychic hold of yesterday yet remains.  We may divorce, we may move, we may give ourselves a new name, yet in our core will ever be a kernel of who we were.  Some will despair of this, others will hope that kernel will grow.

We cannot avoid the inevitable future, much as many would want to find comfort in the past.  Some despair of the future and see only a path heading downward.  Others hear a future, silent hope, a wordless world of wonder.

I find all these things in Edward Hopper’s magical expressions of light.  This artist urban and urbane had another side more rural, more romantic and yet real all in one. Hopper of Nyack, New York was a son of what would be the suburbs now. Not of the city, but yearning for its hope. 

Hopper also knew well the romance of a more rural world, evident in a land of endless evenings and all other times of the day as well.  His landscapes abound with the energy of life.  His seascapes rise with light. Ground Swell above reminds me of who I was.  And tomorrow we will all be creatures falling and rising  on the same sea.

What artist of whatever kind is speaking most to you today?

Comments

[Mark]

I love your ruminations on artists - I'd never seen beyond the isolation and despair in Hopper's work, but damn is it isn't there after all. Thanks!

[Leah A]

Lovely. The light in Hopper's world has always done it for me, too. Interestingly, I've found myself turning to his work, recently. I have several of his paintings in my online "Pictures" file. I've hesitated posting them because I'm not sure how to acredit them. Did you just decide on your own to give the Corcoran credit?

What other artists speak to me today: Well, I avoid mirrors because I fear seeing reflected back at me Munch's "The Scream"

Recently, I find myself obsessed with photography - in particular Eugene Smith, and Bernice Abbott's NY photographs, actually I've dragged out of storage all my huge coffe table photography books, mostly inherited from my father, which I now keep by my bed to look at before I sleep - something hopeful and inspiring even about the most painful of them, because the photographs insist on a belief that despair is never the right response to suffering. Slightly corny, I know, but true.

Along the same lines, I find that Romaire Bearden's work has taken on a special signifigance recently.

Anyway, wonderful post and a great question.