26th November 2024

 I am reading Olivia Laing's book 'The Lonely City'.  The city in question being of course New York.  She writes of Edward Hooper, an artist, a realist artist who died in 1968.  

There is an undertone in his work of loneliness, the solitary person, for instance in his 'Morning Light' we have a print of that in the spare room.  It always catches the eye with its empty interior except for the window and bed on which she site contemplating the view, which is sunny outside. Stark realism  Hooper was very tall, but his wife who demanded that she should always be his model was short, and i wonder if he used her as his model.

Morning Light - Edward Hopper

The second painting is 'Nighthawks', apparently Hooper would walk the streets looking for inspiration and yes there is a loneliness about the spectator staring into an empty bar.  It is his most famous painting but not to my taste.  Which rather sadly does not like humans in her paintings.

Am I going to touch the subject of loneliness, no not really.  Everything in life is given meaning till one tires of it.  All I see in his paintings is a yearning to touch what he paints, the subject strong in his mind.  He captures what he wants to show, but to argue that from what we see to what he is thinking about really doesn't matter.  

Virginia Woolf captures the spirit of loneliness. One felt from her writings a very sad person who lived internally, her mind forever recording what she saw in the external world.

"If solitude fertilizes the imagination, loneliness vacuums it of vitality and sands the baseboards of the spirit with the scratchy restlessness of longing — for connection, for communion, for escape. And yet it is out of this restlessness that so many great works of art are born."

Nighthawks by Edward Hopper

Still I am only at the start of the book and we do know that Olivia Laing went on to find someone she loved in her next book.  Which was nearer to my heart about a garden.  The Garden Against Time. by Olivia Laing