Thoughts on Hopper Drawing: A Painter’s Process

 I read a poem years ago in a small literary journal that inspired bittersweet feelings of solitude and isolation that I have always remembered. The initial idea for, and the metaphor used in, that poem was an evening view from the poet’s passing commuter train. The figure of a woman stood at the window of a particular lighted room in an otherwise  dark city office building. That lonely poem entered my own bibliography in the same manner as many of Edward Hopper’s office building paintings.

My son and I recently attended Hopper Drawing: A Painter’s Process, currently on exhibit at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. The display focuses on Edward Hopper’s creative process. In a short film interview with the (at that time) aged artist, discussing his office building paintings, Hopper credited feelings incited by his end of the working day commuter train rides home as inspiration.

The lonely poem I’ve remembered as a series of sensations speaks to my original question in mid-January about whether certain qualities of our human experience can be better represented by nonverbal mediums such as painting, dance, and musical composition rather than language: Enter Poetry. But also, consider the following quote from Edward Hopper.

“Well, I’ve always been interested in approaching a big city in a train, and I can’t exactly describe the sensations, but they’re entirely human and perhaps have nothing to do with aesthetics. ”
-Edward Hopper

Office at Night/Edward Hopper

 

Rembrandt/On What Painters Paint

Ever since I began attending to Rembrandt, I have noticed and wondered about his repeated choice of violence against, and vulnerability of (young) women as subject matter, exemplified by Lucretia, a fixture in the permanent painting collection at the Minneapolis Institute of Art.

At a recent Carleton College presentation, Tom Rassieur, the John E. Andrus, II Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, partially answered the question when he said Rembrandt was an intensely competitive artist. According to Rassieur, Rembrandt expressed his competitive nature by reinterpreting the works of his most famous contemporaries, Rubens, Tischen, and Raphael. Rembrandt, “took on the competition in his own time.“

http://employees.oneonta.edu/farberas/arth/arth200/women/susanna.html

Researching another subject at the St. Olaf Library this past week, I read the following quote regarding another frequently painted figure from the apocryphal Book of Daniel, the bathing Susanna. “The artists of the Renaissance and the Baroque found inspiration in this subject and erotic undertones of the biblical text made it popular in the last part of the nineteenth century.” Danish painting 1870-1985: catalogue, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek / by Vera Rasmussen and Susanne Thestrup Truelsen.

At Carleton, Rossieur also said, “Rembrandt was associating himself with highly esteemed artists from antiquity,” by using the red, white, black, and yellow pallette used by Apelles of Kos, a well-known, ancient Greek painter, in his own painting, Lucretia.

Lucretia-1666
Minneapolis Institute of Art

According to Wikipedia, “The suicide of Lucretia has been an enduring subject for visual artists, including Titian, Rembrandt, Dürer, Raphael, Botticelli, Jörg Breu the Elder, Johannes Moreelse, Artemisia Gentileschi, Damià Campeny, Eduardo Rosales, Lucas Cranach the Elder and others.”

In the aspect of this particular subject matter, Rembrandt’s choice was not idiosyncratic. Composers, sculptors, poets, novelists, screenwriters, and painters, have chosen vulnerable young women from mythological and biblical stories as their subject matter down through the ages.

How to Make Money Off the Unspecting Internet in the Slowest Way Possible

My compliments to you on your posted paintings!

I remember a piece in The Star Tribune a couple of years ago about artists who were making a career and decent living doing pet portraits. As I remember it, one artist did traditional paintings and one of the artist’s work was a partially abstract version of representational.

• startribune.com/lifestyle/136599153.html
• http://straydogarts.com/
• http://lintuart.com/1/

Peas and Cougars

Whenever I’m really busy and I actually manage to get stuff done, I look around and wonder why I haven’t gotten a raise yet. Then I remember that life doesn’t give raises and really you just have to be happy if you manage to get through the month without more crippling debt or every pair of tights you own running the first time you put them on.

I admit this is partly my own fault. I’ve noticed a disturbing trend that as soon as I get comfortable or finish a big task I immediately want to take on something else. I really don’t know where I get it from because I swear to you that I really excel at procrastinating and putting things off (ex: see blog) with the best of them and really I enjoy nothing more than wasting Saturday mornings drinking coffee and critiquing PBS cooking shows. I’m…

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Saint Matthew and the Angel

A few years ago, when our family visited The Louvre, we waited in line for hours while the entire museum remained spontaneously closed. When they finally opened that evening, the Italian Wing remained shut off. No visitor on that particular evening viewed its most frequently mentioned prize, The Mona Lisa.

The loveliest thing, it turns out, is often not the magnificent view of the most famous painting, sculpture, landscape, or decorating scheme, the ones I have waited my whole life to see, but rather the occasional unexpected thrill, like the one Rembrandt so beautifully placed on the wrinkled face of old Saint Matthew when the tiny hairs inside his aging ear tickled from the sweet hot breath of that lovely youth standing close beside him.