Re-drawing Hopper
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The investigation Re-Drawing Hopper, which was presented at the seminar From Charcoal to Pixel (M.U.V.I.M. Museo
Valenciano de la Ilustración y Modernidad in 2008) contributes to a specific consideration of Edward Hopper’s
paintings whereby drawing becomes a tool of analysis and interpretation. This study is based on the work of an
artist in which drawing has special significance.
This reflection profiles the work of Hopper from the point of view of the coherence of the light he draws. It follows
an analysis that itself uses drawing to examine two of Hopper’s key paintings, ultimately advancing the field of
knowledge pertaining to his work.
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Edward Hopper in a meeting about drawing
When a change of curriculum occurred in the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of the Basque Country a few years ago, it was decided to develop a new workshop subject concerning the applications of geometry. After searching for references for the analysis, the works of Hopper, which demonstrated the elements required for such a study, were found to be more than suitable. His paintings are readily accessible to the viewer and present a realistic vision of marked photographic character.
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The analysis was carried out using criteria from the area of descriptive geometry and, more specifically, the conical system. Painting, however, is a sensitive act—an act of knowledge, not of science. It is made by an artist, it is lived. It is complex and does not lend itself to a strictly objective analysis. Nevertheless, paintings such as these are based on the laws of perspective.
Despite being a seemingly inseparable set, the constructive level of drawing was demarcated from the iconic level of the image. This process was essential in order to analyze the quality of light that is embodied in these paintings and drawings.
The analysis consisted of re-drawing, an act of graphic deconstruction. Both drawing by hand and with a computer were used in the study, and the result is therefore faithful to title of the seminar: From Charcoal to Pixel.
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Drawing in Hopper's painting
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Hopper’s painting is direct and immediate in its plasticity, not sophisticated, and its execution is very drawn, not subtle. Aside from early work that shows some influences of post-impressionism, his paintings, in a sense, are resolved in the initial drawing. He works hard on the image before the act of painting even begins. Up to fifty sketches of his work “Cinema in New York” are known .
In its purest form drawing is not always apparent in his paintings but it appears as a structure, a scaffolding, a project basis. This occurs in almost all his painting in which the evidence of the drawing— in prints, sketches, illustrations, records and other materials—gives form to the whole idea of the picture despite being masked beneath it.
This is not to say that Hopper was a drawing virtuoso, although he did have a wealth of professional drawing experience as an advertising artist, which influenced his formation as an artist as much as his academic training. He uses drawing in his paintings to define the idea before translating it into a picture. It is not possible to think of his work as separate from the underlying drawing.
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A drawing is designed for each project and thus he works through various levels of iconicity, from basic sketches to controlled compositions before starting to paint with oil. Hopper builds, he structures; his training as an illustrator is solid and we know that, at the very least, he made use of photography in his illustrations. His framings themselves are photographic. According to Jose Luis Borao, he would have been the very best storyboard cartoonist for a film director.
We also know of his fascination for film noir, in which the image has an important perspective component. He went to the movies whenever he lacked inspiration. The Tate Modern realized a major exhibition of his work in 2004 and analyzed the correlation between his work and contemporary and post-contemporary cinema. We know that the film director Elia Kazan and Hopper admired and “used” each other artistically without getting to know each other personally and that many other directors have used his compositions as if they were authentic story boards or even scenery for their cinematic discourse.
The presence of drawing in Hopper’s process reveals itself in another significant fact. In his register books—his ledgers—Hopper draws each painting as a reference, made after the completion of the main work. Beside his notes, his wife Josephine left annotated details of the realization of the work, such as the type of linen and preparation, the colors and varnishes, the buyer and price of the work and even, on occasion, personal observations. He rarely incorporated printed photographs or images of his paintings in his register.
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“Isolation, melancholy, loneliness, silence”
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These stark Hopper paintings, defined in terms of isolation, melancholy, solitude and silence by many of his specialists, are full of elements that denote oppression, alienation and unease; circumstances that derived from his existential beliefs and that marked the emergence of such connotations.
This group of paintings is characterized by well defined lighting in the form of direct rays of sunlight, as well as characteristic frames that are sometimes a little forced and have a pronounced photographic character. They present us, or even better; immerse us in the most psychological dark and human side of the North American dream from the early and mid-twentieth century. The representation of this atmosphere is subject to an element of constant alienation that causes its deepest faults to stand out. I believe that this is the story that truly interested the painter.
In a filmed interview from 1961, Hopper quotes Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, expressing as would the creator of a manifesto:
“The beginning and end of all literary activity is the reproduction of the world that surrounds me by means of the world that is in me, all things being grasped, related, recreated, molded, and reconstructed in a personal form and original manner. For me this definition applies to painting... I guess my paintings represent myself ”.
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Here his personality is revealed: reserved, withdrawn, introverted and stubborn are some of the epithets used by his biographers and other experts to describe him. He was tenacious and impermeable in his autonomy from the creative reflection of the moment in which he lived. When interviewed he expresses himself briefly and tersely, although he is never insignificant or trivial and he tries to formulate precisely his most intimate interests, despite sometimes being cryptic or ironic with his language.
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Brief biographical note
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Hopper was born in Nyack, New York near the Hudson River in 1882. He drew since he was very young at the local school of Nyack and from there he went to New York where he studied under Robert Henri at the New York Institute of Art and Design, which encouraged a realistic style of painting.
He belonged to a family of strong Baptist convictions and his father was a merchant. He was brought up in an environment of strict morality and he was encouraged and supported by his parents in his education and artistic interests. He made three visits to Europe arriving in Paris for the first time in 1906, where he was fascinated by the work of the Impressionists. In 1913 he returned to New York, where he settled permanently at 3 Washington Square North.
During that crucial period in Paris, the vision he got from the avant-garde was that of post-impressionism. One could say that he was impervious to what was going on with regard to innovation. Perhaps these movements in the art world affirmed him in his own convictions. He looked at everything that happened in the movement of Cubism indifferently, and in no way has he been associated with the circle of Gertrude Stein.
He sold his first oil painting when he was 30 or 31 years old. Until then he had worked as an advertising and illustration artist. He produced vast quantities of work in this field and its undertaking provided him with skill and professionalism, though he did not do it with pleasure. He said he did not devote more than three days in a row to this work, his other devotion being his painting. He did not paint exclusively for a living until he was 40.
Edward Hopper died in New York in 1967. His wife Josephine Nivison Hopper passed away only months later, and bequeathed at her death all of Hopper’s work, including the diaries, to the Whitney Museum of American Modern Art (Josephine Nivison Hopper Bequest).
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Paintings of contradictory evidence
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Anyone who approaches Hopper with curiosity is immediately immersed in the spatial and luminous qualities of his scenes that take place in environments of easy visualization and understanding. As a result of this fascinating circumstance, my focus has been placed on his oil paintings that feature interiors.
Written sources that clearly applied to this research topic could not easily be found. There were references to numerous mistakes in the logic of the constructive geometry of the shadows, however such features were not easy to locate in the actual works as such because, although his later work lacks technical and plastic subtlety, it is well drawn. Minor inconsistencies, excesses and inventions do appear in multiple paintings, however, and we can affirm it to be a trend in his work, for example; Inside Summer, 1909; Eleven AM, 1926; Chop Suey, 1929; Room in Brooklyn, 1932; In a City Morning, 1944; Western Motel, 1957; Woman in the Sun, 1961; and Chair Car, 1965. Summer in the city. 1949 11 [Kanzfelder 1998, 188] “The light source in Room by the sea cannot be precisely located. Apparently it is not in the plane of the picture but in a plane occupied by a hypothetical observer, as may be concluded from the angles of the borderlines between light and shadow. While the illumination appears logical at first sight, closer scrutiny reveals it to be deceptive”.
Conclusive discrepancies were identified in two paintings—Sun in an empty room, 1964 and Rooms by the Sea, 1951—the reason being that the absence of characters, the direction of the incoming light and inconsistent drawing of the shadows have led many authors to reference them (Renner, Kranzfelder, Wells, etc).
Why does he re-draw or reconstruct the instantaneous reality of light and shadows? Why does such a “visualizing” and realistic artist take such liberties in his representations? Why is it that in his most synthetic pictures he embarks on such bold transgression and reconstruction? This is the area of knowledge in which this study aims to examine and contribute.
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Is this contradictory evidence a result of artistic license? Compositional tricks? Or are they simply anecdotes?
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Painter of Light
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Hopper’s treatment of light is the key element that I will advance by showing explicit and implicit elements. Hopper has spoken emphatically of the white light of midday that, as opposed to the warmer light of dawn and dusk, is cold and hard. The spatial story of his interiors is narrated by light, both direct and environmental, with which he draws the space, constructs and composes.
Vittorio Storaro, the Italian director of photography, places Caravaggio and Hopper in comparison with regards to their use of light. For the former the shadow is the basis of the picture, “the painter pulls light out from the shadows”, while for Hopper it is the other way around, “the sun is the protagonist... he is a painter of the light”. According to Antonio Lopez, it is “the most stark light in painting… it is not a poetic light”.
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The issue of light and shadow is key in Hopper’s work and it will be examined using two conclusive paintings, Rooms by the sea and Sun in an empty room.
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The empty space in "Sun in an empty sun"
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I define this picture as a project-drawing of an idea embodied with the tool of oil paint. It is a painting in which the construction of the only subject takes priority: the daylight coming through the window and filling the space of the room, “refining and purifying” as would a still according to Jose Luis Borao, who states that “it distills reality”. In the same sense Francisco Calvo Serraller establishes a comparison of this painting with the synthesis and dematerialization in the work of Malevich and Rothko. Hopper explains that he removed a figure that he had envisaged for the picture.
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Troyen states: “The picture, composed of tender brushstrokes that create the impression of shimmering light, shows a room not yet occupied or—perhaps more likely given Hopper’s advanced age—recently vacated “. This might be interpreted as Hopper’s lack of ability to draw figures but he painted “Two Comediants” three years later nevertheless. The absence of the human figure is due to the fact that the room is willingly left empty. This key issue is also shown in “Sketch for an empty room”. What is essential was to empty a space and fill it with light.
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Such must be the emptiness of the painting that, in addition, parts of the shadow of the window frame are removed. But what is more important to note is the effect of the removal of the shadow in order to position the light like a curtain that rises from the bottom edge of the picture.
This is not an ambient light such as that featured in Hopper’s Morning in a City—a light that would flood the space on a semi-cloudy day—but rather a midday light that bursts into the space and draws a sharp and hard contrast. It is not the sunlight he is painting, but rather the light that the painting requires for its story.
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The issue of temporality: condensed time
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At a conference on Science-Arts relations at the University of the Basque Country in 2007, Jorge Wagensberg insisted that loneliness is a substantial element in the significance of the work of Hopper. What is a key question in this investigation is how the density or space-time intensity of his paintings enhances and acts as a catalyst for that feeling.
Hopper’s scenes are not instantaneous, equivalent to the selection of a frame in cinematic terms. One can easily check through a 3D simulation that the light of the picture corresponds, more or less, to a determined lapse in time—2 or 3 hours, depending on the latitude of the place and day of the year. This can also be verified by constructing the scene in conic perspective, using computer software or a scale model20. We know that Hopper did so using a scale model with High Noon (1949), probably in order to depict the light as being tangential to the roof.
In Sun in an Empty Room the sun floods the room and “insolates” the walls and floor as if they were photosensitive surfaces so that, as with a pinhole camera, the exposure time could be contained and reflected. The image remains imbued with the temporality of the successive moments of its contemplation.
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By contrast, the average time of a viewer’s gaze of a work at an exhibition, measured in statistical terms, is very small, maybe a few seconds. What can be perceived and analyzed in that time? When inspected as such by an average or uninformed viewer, any of Hopper’s paintings would resist and affirm its virtual construction of space and light.
This is a definitive aspect of the puzzle that Hopper presents, and it supports the thesis of Kranzfelder that the apparently logical light is misleading upon closer inspection. I would turn the phrase and state that it is even the deceptive light that passes unnoticed at first glance.
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Graphic deconstruction
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As Hopper’s painting is a construction of intellectual character before being sensitive or expressive, the term “deconstruction” defines with precision the type of re-drawing used for this analysis. Hopper builds a representative idea, a “frame” in which he synthesizes an elaborate message that he wants to transmit visually.
Through pertinent simplification using the criteria of Conic Perspective I have analyzed the constructive inconsistencies of the two aforementioned works.
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“Rooms by the sea”
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In geometric terms, this work presents the incongruity of light expressed in two moments that correspond to a time span that can be measured in the horizontal angle formed by the shadows at the lower edge of the painting. These two moments act as double evidence that tells us about a detained solar time that is easily quantifiable.
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“Sun in an empty room”
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Presented here are four indisputable pieces of evidence of inconsistent lighting, represented in diagrams A, B, C and D. The sum of all of these individual instances might form some similarity with the complete painting. To observe the distance between the real phenomenon and the representation, however, and respecting the position of the Sun in diagram B, we can reconstruct the narrow halo of light that would occur at the intersection of the rectangles interior and exterior to the window to observe the difference between the hypothetical light in that instant and the represented one.
Except for diagram A, we also find great similarity with the complete painting if we consider the light as being projected from a lamppost outside.
In any case, the most reasonable resolution for the painting can be expressed in a fifth possibility—an “infinite window” (with metaphorical license)— whose light, in counterpoint to that of the painting, we have simulated in a schematic drawing based on calculations of the painting. We have thus dematerialized the represented space by way of an approximate geometric analysis.
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A way of concluding
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This reflection has been made through the drawing, or rather, re-drawing of the work of Edward Hopper. There are many images that demonstrate visual inconsistencies in shadows and constructive aspects such as invented horizons and vanishing points. Here we present two paintings—Rooms by the sea and Sun in an empty room—that do not feature protagonists and that several authors, such as Renner, Kranzfelder and Wells, have referenced. We consider these paintings to be definitive of our analysis as they categorically and conclusively manifest the basic ideas that we bring into this discussion.
Perhaps the biggest contribution that this investigation makes is to acknowledge the level of manipulation that Hopper employed in the geometry of his shadows, thus clarifying the analysis by Kranzfelder—“... there is an apparent logic in the light treatment but when looked at carefully it is misleading”—and that of Renner—“The rigorous structure of his paintings, their limited subject matter and Hopper’s experimental use of light create and impression of calm and concentration which can itself be seen as a response to society”.
Hopper proportions mystery by playing at the threshold of the visually permissible while making strong transgressions in the geometry of light and shadow. This connects him with the metaphysical, which disregards the logic of causality, and places him in a territory that is perhaps more subtle, effective and interesting. He creates a direct dialogue with the viewer and then makes them doubt what they are seeing, with scenes that are fully accessible given their perceptive abilities and visual memory.
The alterations in his work are imbued with spatial and temporal qualities that add density to his paintings, distancing them from simply being painted representations, film stills or snapshots. Realistic and logical visualizations are made secondary to pictorial and compositional liberties. It could be said that such alterations act as “temporal condensers”.
As such, the sensations or feelings of solitude and silence in his paintings are empowered by the condensation of light, which provides a sense of detention, restlessness and anxiety, “a reflection of my inner world,” as stated by Hopper. The time of the painter and the time of the gaze of the viewer are, in effect, the keys to the dialogue with painting.
The time of the painter is the actual time of contemplation of a space that he is creating. It is also his existential time, the need to reflect a conclusive idea of emptiness and light; in this case, stripping the picture of all the attributes except for the light that he believes is best for expressing his ideas. “It may not be very human, I wanted to paint the sun on the wall of a house...” The light that enters a window, however, is not what Hopper is interested in depicting. It is the light he needs to convey his thinking, his feelings and his experience of reality that interests him the most.
The time of the viewer, who often views painting without scrutiny, is a product of their visual and artistic culture, and how they experience time. This causes the paintings of Hopper to resist revealing their deeper mysteries at first glance, while returning an aura of uncertainty or perplexity.
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http://www.rebelion.org/noticia.php?id=19559. Higinio Polo. Edward Hopper: desolada america.
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Original layout by Haydé Negro
