Edward Hopper was born in 1882 in Nyack, a small town to the north of New York City. Hopper attended the New York School of Art from 1900 to 1906, which is where he met Robert Henri, with whom he developed a deep, personal relationship. Henri's tendency to hold himself and his students to extremely high standards, as well as his belief that everyday American life was an inexhaustible source of inspiration for artists and creators, had a significant impact upon Hopper, helping define his style.
While Hopper did adopt impressionism eventually, it is for his contribution to the realism movement that he is primarily renowned. Hopper's portrayal of reality, however, drew mainly from his own temperament, illustrating that realism was about more than just creating photographic representations of whatever the artist saw. Hopper's paintings were as much of a subjective interpretation of reality as works belonging to any other medium. Photography too, despite quite literally generating exact replicas of visions, can be imbued with the photographer's interpretation.
The aspect of reality that Hopper experienced and portrayed has been famously described as "urban isolation." His paintings often feature vacant cityscapes and solitary figures, lit up by sharp patches of light, and surrounded by shadows with seemingly no end. And yet, while his paintings definitely evoke a sense of acute awareness of the alienation that accompanies modern living, it is impossible to deny that the stillness that pervades Hopper's paintings also fills one with a sense of wanting to be in the scene depicted and absolutely nowhere else in that moment; a sense of peace, even! A sense of comfort, dare we dream?
It is this simultaneity of the warmth of the embrace of an old friend, and the coldness of their absence, that accompanies Hopper's work and makes his voice perfect for singing of the age of quarantine. I am not the first to realise this. Viral messages to the effect of "we're all Edward Hopper paintings now" have already been making the rounds for a few months now. Hopper's paintings always seem to insinuate in some way that they depict a world from which every person, except those present in the painting, has vanished. And as we sit here, confined to our neighbourhoods, out houses, our rooms, it is easy to forget that the rest of the world still exists, since it is always just outside the frame.
This is not to say that Hopper's work only has thematic significance. There is a lot that photographers can learn from the composition of Hopper's paintings. Their most striking feature is probably the lighting, which Hopper uses to transform mundane, even boring scenes into something extraordinary. Hopper's love for windows is also notable, with them framing the subjects in most of his figurative paintings. There is a quiet drama to Hopper's work - one that we will now explore - from my window to yours.
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