Unedited Thoughts on Edward Hopper

Really the most obvious thing that jumps out to one is the sense of loneliness and solitude and contemplation in Hopper’s paintings. Even when there is no human in the paintings, there is a tremendous sense of the artist or the viewer adding something to the room or landscape by viewing it. Hopper’s works often depict lone humans in different situations, and when we’re able to see their facial expressions, they’re never one of outright happiness. We see person after person in environments made by humans—buildings, cities, offices, movie theaters, homesteads, etc.—and what stands out is how lonely and solitary they feel. Anyone who has ever felt utterly, devastatingly alone in a crowded room can relate.

Rather than pick up on how Hopper’s works influenced things like the liminal art/photography movement, I think it’s worth noting that to me his paintings aren’t about the absence of things or being in an in-between zone/state of being of some sort. Rather when there’s humans they seem resistant to their current situation yet resigned to it. They’re still lost in thought or rumination about their life but their look and auras are of one who has accepted, perhaps capitulated to the situation they’re in, whether it’s an unhappy marriage or a new suddenly unhappy job or a moment or realization you know you can’t do anything about. When there are no human figures, we see ourselves in the landscapes; we feel almost invited in to project our own feelings of loneliness and alienation.

Yet in this last point I find there to be a feeling of mutuality and invitation in Hopper’s works. Even if they make you feel lonely, they also make you aware that other people have felt just like you have, even if the details are technically different. I look at a work like Man Seated On Bed (1906) and Summer Interior (1909) and especially Office In A Small City (1953) and I can see flashes of my own life, and/or people I’ve known, in these snapshots in time. With the latter work we see a common technique of Hopper’s during this mid to late era, where we see a human figure but also a bit of a voyeuristic angle were we see the exterior of the building/setting the human figure is in. Perhaps another way to see it is almost like an omnipotent viewer peering into dollhouses at the tiny lives there.

The emptiness of the cityscapes with one human figure in focus really underscores how many people over the years have felt alienated and alone despite ironically living in large urban environments. Curious then that the last painting I’m riffing off of should specify that it’s portraying a SMALL city. Anyway, I imagine the person in this painting has just sat down for their first day of work, and—peering across the cityscape that at first perhaps is scenic and lovely but will soon become ordinary and repetitive—it dawns on them that this is going to be the next however many years of their life. You are just a cog in the machine of society; welcome home.

Interesting to me that some art critics back in the day tried to associated Hopper’s later works with abstract art/surrealism, I think this is just because of the vaguely dreamlike feeling his later human-less landscapes/cityscapes/roomscapes can have. Certainly you can see Rooms By The Sea (1951) and it can look a bit along the lines of a Renè Magritte b-side, but this is another feeling the viewer brings to the work. If you visually engage with this work you can explain away how the perspective makes it seem like the door opens directly onto water, when in actuality this room may be up on a hill overlooking a body of water, with the POV disguising the steps or slop just outside the door. One could interpret this painting quite simply and just as validly as: the open door to nature brings in water and light, crucial elements to (most) life. While the room in the back has sunlight too, it’s less and fainter than the open door to nature.

Much has been commented on, even by the artist himself, with her focus on light and shadows. I feel this is mirrored in the focus on loneliness/solitude and external forces. By which I mean, even in the landscapes with no human figure, the viewer sort of substitutes in and is made to reflect on their own feelings. The landscape can match your mood or you an allow it to suggest one to you. When there are human figures, even more than one, you still get the sense they are inside themselves and looking outward, rather than imagining how they fit “into” the scene they’re in. For instance, the earlier cited work Summer Interior depicts a woman who is in her environment yet given the arrangement and her state of dress and look, she is also a million miles away from her environment focused on something else. Did she just get divorced? Is she depressed and thinking of the past? Or it is even something good that has her so flustered?

 

30 For 30: Salvador Dali

I turn 30 on February 18th. I want to celebrate this, and get myself back into writing, by spending a few weeks rambling about the 30 things that have meant the most to me over the years. These will be from music, movies, books, videogames, and maybe even art and other things for good measure. I feel like my life has been much more about the things I've experienced than it has the people I've known or the places I've traveled to, and these 30 things have helped to make my 30 years more than worth all the innumerable bad things. Expect heartfelt over-sharing and overly analytical explanations galore! In part 6, we get a little weird with Salvador Dali.

I've seen Captain Beefheart referred to as “the Salvador Dali of rock music”, which is just critical shorthand for “he's a really weird cult-like figure who made peerless, visionary art.” Whether or not you like Beefheart or Dali, there's no denying their totality of vision, their originality. I see them as being separate people who happened to exist in the world in a way so out-of-step with normal reality that they become akin to twins or brothers. I'm not grasping at straws trying to tie the two of them together. Once he retired from music, Beefheart became a painter of some repute himself, after having been a child prodigy artist in his youth.


The big difference, at least as far as the art they produced goes, is that Salvador Dali never purposefully dumbed down his work to appeal to a mass market. He wanted to make money—I'm pretty sure some of the portraits he did were commissions—but never at the cost of having to change or edit his vision. Beefheart's music sometimes had to bend to the will of the commercial world, so there's a stark contrast between overproduced AOR albums like Bluejeans & Moonbeams and unfiltered madness like Trout Mask Replica (which, fun fact, contains a song called 'Dali's Car').


What drew me to Captain Beefheart is the same thing that drew me to Salvador Dali: they're weird as hell. It's a bit broad to say I've always liked weird things without being able to get more specific but it's also kind of the truth. When I was young, I liked Ren & Stimpy because it's weird. When I was a bit older, I liked EarthBound because it's weird. When I was even older, I liked David Lynch films because they're weird. Each of these is weird in a different way, but there's a characteristic “other” quality to each one that becomes immediately obvious when you compare them to most of the rest of their respective mediums. For instance, Inception is kind of a weird movie, but it's completely normal compared to Lynch's Inland Empire. So what I meant by 'a characteristic “other” quality' is that you'd have to file it under “other” when categorizing it, as you would with Dali. I mean, there's no “weird” genre category on Netflix, is there?

Salvador Dali is, to me, the king of weird. It's difficult to have a conversation about weird or surreal things without him coming up because he's like the nexus point of weirdness. I'll never forget watching Un Chien Andalou, the surrealist film he made with Luis Bunuel, during a film class in college. This movie is from 1929 but still has the capacity to unsettle and confuse modern audiences. It's timeless in the way all great art is timeless to someone with an open mind. This is to say nothing of Dali's art, which is still as popular today as it ever was. I'm not that informed when it comes to visual artists but anyone I've ever talked to who is more knowledgeable has agreed that he's a genius.

This is the book I have, though the cover is in English 

I may not know my art too well but I do know my Dali. I have a huge book containing every painting he ever did, and I've gone through the entire thing several times. During the Summer of 2011 I had this daily routine where, when I got home from work, I would put on music, smoke some pot, make some tea, and sit in the sunshine beside my living room window while smoking clove cigarettes and looking through as many pages of the book as I could before it was time to go make dinner. I used sheets of paper to mark off pages that held my favorite pieces and each time through the book my favorites kept changing. I don't think you need chemicals to enjoy doing the same thing because I'm also obsessed with Dali even while sober...but they certainly didn't hurt.

Dali was inspired by the unconscious, of course—you could describe each one of his paintings as being its own dream world—but his vision also encompassed one's conscious visual imagination while awake. His work created with the “paranoiac-critical” method is like the art version of optical illusions and images that change depending on how you focus on them. A good example of what I'm talking about is shown below—in the first case, you can see either a rabbit or a duck. In the second case, the work 'Paranoiac Visage' (1935), Dali took a postcard of African villagers sitting in front of a hut and painted it so that, when turned on its side, you see a woman's head. It's like a more advanced version of how, if you look with the right eyes and imagination, electrical sockets and the front of cars can look like faces.

Rabbit or duck?

Villagers or face?

The reason Dali means so much to me is that, once I got beyond the initial delight at how weird his art is, I keep coming back to him because there's more going on than just weirdness for weirdness's sake. You can throw together any mish-mash of ideas and images, post it online, and have people look at it and go “LOL so random!” Indeed, much of Japan's weirdness seems built on this foundation. But with Dali, there's an intelligence and vision to his works that go beyond him just trying to make weird looking things to amuse himself and freak out the squares. I may never know what he's saying with some of his pieces, or if he's saying anything at all, but it always strikes me more as playful than nonsensical. With his greater works, I seem to either see new things in them each time or I react to it in a different way. With something as dense as 'Hallucinogenic Torreador' (1968-1970), you can always pick out new details you missed before, provided you have a high quality version of it to look at—the little boy in the lower right corner of it is Dali's portrait of himself as a boy, and appears as an ongoing motif in a few other paintings. 

Might have to find a bigger image to get the full effect

With a lesser known and minimalist piece like 'Dark Tapeworms' (1978), I feel something different every time I see it. I don't really know what it is about this painting that sticks with me. I doubt any other Dali fan in history has liked this one as much as I do. His other better known images that have become part of the collective consciousness—like the burning giraffes, the melting watches, the paranoiac-critical method paintings like 'Swans Reflecting Elephants' (1937)—may be what the public goes to when they think of Dali. For me, though, he has become as much about 'Dark Tapeworms' or his shockingly normal paintings like 'Glass Of Wine And Boat' (1956). 

Peaceful, eerie

In this way, Dali's importance to my life has been to remind me that we are, all of us, never just one thing. Dali isn't just the weird-ass artist because if you look beyond his two or three best-known works, he surprises you with some some still life's, nudes, and landscapes that no one would guess are his. Captain Beefheart isn't just that weird-ass musician, because his early music is pretty much bluesy garage rock and he went on to make a living as a painter. And as for me, I'm not just a guy who writes about music. I wrote a novel, once. I write poems, sometimes. I make music, sometimes. I like booze and crazy experimental music, but I also like quiet afternoons and tea. Not to mention, this 30 For 30 series encompasses videogames, books, music, movies, TV shows, and artists. If this makes me a dilettante, I guess it's better than having monomania.

In spite of my taste for weird, I really love this one