“No amount of skillful invention can replace the essential element of imagination.” ~ Edward Hopper

“Rooms by the Sea” (1951, oil on canvas)
by Edward Hopper

                   

Feels like a Hopper day.

Whenever I see an image by artist Edward Hopper, I am reminded of two things: Mari and the museum, which had one of my favorite Hopper paintings on display (“New York Pavements”). The people in Hopper’s paintings always seem to be alone, even when with someone else, which appeals to my love of solitude.

For more information about the artist, click here. Wikipaintings has a nice collection of work by Hopper.

Here are some of my favorites:

“Drug Store” (1927, oil on canvas)

“Nighthawks” (1942, oil on canvas)

“New York Pavements” (1924)

“Night-Windows” (1927, oil on canvas)

“Rooms in Brooklyn” (1932, oil on canvas)

“Automat” (1927, oil on canvas)

“House by the Railroad” (1927, oil on canvas)

“Gloucester Harbor” (1912)

“Houses of Squam Light, Gloucester” (1923, watercolor)

“Lights at Two Lights” (1927)

“Captain Strout’s House, Portland Head” (1927)

“Lighthouse Hill” (1927)

“Five A.M.” (1937, oil on canvas)

“The Lee Shore” (1941, oil on canvas)

“The Long Leg” (c1930, oil on canvas)

My Edward Hopper Eye, My Claude Monet

I walk the streets at night
shutting first one eye, then the other.

The left eye is Hopper, its lens
too clear for comfort, the hard lines
of a town you’re stuck in, always
August, noon or midnight.

The right eye haloes each street lamp.
Threads of light dissolve each tree into
the next in Paris, spring,
dusk.

In Monet’s garden of well-tended horizons
I sleep three nights, then someone delivers
a newspaper. In the damp green air
events rub off on my hands.

In every storm
one eye watches bare light
shock the land, split a tree;
the other sees each gutter
alive with wings and the rain rinsing.

And so the eyes argue:
one strips, one clothes. One cauterizes,
one salves. And I
walk on.

~ Veronica Patterson

                   

Music by Helios, “Halving the Compass”

Related articles

• The real landscape of Edward Hopper (telegraph.co.uk)

 

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