Today's link is something really good: a slideshow from Slate Magazine of the paintings of Edward Hopper called "The Secret World of Edward Hopper." I fell in love with Hopper in college. I even wrote a poem about the poem called "Morning Sun" Sadly, the picture isn't included in the slideshow, but at least you'll see when you look at Sun in an Empty Room that few could paint sunlight like Hopper. Later on, when I started making photographs, I used to try for similar effects.
Looking at Morning Sun, the phrase that came to me (I didn't
use it in the poem, though) was "melancholy printed in light." But
what I couldn't get at, and what I see now, is how the people in Hopper
all seem completely transitory and weightless compared to the objects
that surround them. Even the most substantial people in a Hopper
painting all look as immaterial as ghosts. Compared to the objects
that surround me they're mere smears on the canvas, grieved but
uncomprehending specters just passing through.
Later when I was reading Coleridge, this line from the poem "Dejection" brought that picture into my mind: "a stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief." It describes perfectly the feeling Hopper's paintings---for example, see "Early Sunday Morning" and "Office in a Small City"---convey. All that light expended; so little absorbed. Even the brilliantly illuminated "Rooms by the Sea," with its hard whites and brilliant blue-greens: the open door shows that the room opens directly OVER the water. Who opened it and where are they now? On the other side of the sunlit wall is one of those bare rooms Hopper painted, with a sofa in tones of earth and rust with a picture hanging over it we can't see. Hopper's interiors are empty even when there are people inside them; no one can make you feel the presence of an absence like he can.
No one does a better job of painting dejection, blankness, melancholy, "drowsy, stifled, unimpassioned grief." Each picture implies whole world's of silent, uncomprehending melancholy and secret suffering.
Christopher Bentley's comments concerning Hopper are well worth reading.
Anyway, here's the link to the page.
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