So today i want to try something different and write in english, cause it’s been a long time since I did it for the last time. Well, you guessed it, I’m currently under the influence of the MCU and a lot of artists’ works -and a little bit of pot and alcohol rn lol-. I think as an unemployed student that spend a lot of time on vsco cam, watching movies and appreciating art, it is important just blatantly rip off someone’s style by understanding why it exists in the first place and how it makes you feel when you consume it as a tentative of self understanding (and historical understanding also, but it’s not the point that i feel like talking rn). A quick example of what I mean is the time I spent studying a lot of my favorite artists and trying to imitate (and fail) and expand upon certain things that I like in their work, like Aliens vs Predator 2.
In terms of my favorite paint artist ever is the painter Edwart Hopper. Whenever I look at any of his works, i feel something every time -and if you’re like me, feeling any emotion is rare, the feeling I get is something I strive to emulate in my “real life”. So, in his paintings, I feel like I’m peeking in on a world where there’s nobody left except the people in the frame, sort of an abstract loneliness, everything feels abandoned yet preserved. Though that may just be me projecting my own inner dialogue onto the work — art is subjective after all, you may look at the same painting and think “huh thats an old painting”, and that’s ok.
When I first saw Edward Hopper’s most famous work, Nighthawks — which is my twitter cover btw-, I knew I was onto something, from that point I started studying everything I could about hopper’s work but from an amateur sense. On a more fundamental level I noticed about 100 things about his style, besides the fact that he likes painting gas stations which I enjoy photographing, perhaps Edward Hopper and I would have been homies.
The first thing I noticed in his work is the lighting, the key factor in any of his paintings and I personally think this alone is what creates the mood of anybody at work. His lighting is always at an angle and in terms of tone it’s very early morning or evening light colored, however his night´s scenes also offer something to dissect in most cases the lighting only comes from one source, creating the sense of isolation and encompassing darkness around the subject.
Another thing I ripped from hopper´s work is that a lot of his paintings are somewhat pedestrian in nature, I mean he had a paint that’s literally called “Sun in an empty room”. He’s not painting anything crazy like a medieval knight fighting a two-headed dragon, he’s just painting normal people in normal places but combined with the composition and lighting as well as hopper´s secret 11 herbs and spices, they become extraordinary. I think this is the key that I like to see when I´m admiring some picture, painting or even trying to create one of them, just ordinary scenes that make the audience want to jump in and be a part of them.
Nighthawks makes me want to exist nowhere else but in this painting, mainly because time still paints while in reality it marches on until we wither away and become dust; but that troublingly deep psychological burden is from my therapist to bear. However, I like to think Hopper just randomly showed up outside these people bars, gas stations and houses and started furiously master painting.
Additionally, I noticed with a lot of Hopper´s black and white work there is a lot of contrast in comparison to the color work, which is a little more tame. Talking about his color work, I really like the scene from the movie Jaws which he painted in 1939, entitled Groundswell. The paint follows the most basic rule in color theory, complementary colors. The sky and water are both blue, while the subjects of the image have tan skin and the boat has accents of orange wood. Orange and blue are two that go together so well that many modern day movies have adopted this look, like Finding Nemo, StarWars, InfinityWar poster, Garfild and Blade Runner 2049 -but that’s a different topic for a different time.
I´m so high rn that I am currently losing my train of thoughts while writing this.
I enjoy the natural vibrance, that doesn’t hit you over the head with saturation, and the realistic beauty of his paintings. His images come a bit too sterile something about the physicality of film kind of to me makes it seem peering into a memory and some crazy way that makes no sense at all; I feel like that somehow gets me closer to the feel of Edward Hopper’s work.
So that’s pretty much it. I have been on a deep dive on hopper´s work over the past couple weeks, which is frankly pretty easy because I have no personal goals in life -and study anatomy is boring af- and i actually quite enjoy staying inside my house protecting me from the coronavirus.
