Edward Hopper Quotes
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I am after ME his response on the question what he was after, in his sober painting in 1963 'Sun in an empty room'.
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All I ever wanted to do is to paint sunlight on the side of a wall.
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The only quality that endures in art is a personal vision of the world. Methods are transient: personality is enduring.
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I am interested primarily in the vast field of experience and sensation which neither literature nor a purely plastic art deals with.
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So much of every art is an expression of the subconscious that it seems to me most of all the important qualities are put there unconsciously, and little of importance by the conscious intellect. But these are things for the psychologist to untangle.
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The man's the work. Something does not come out of nothing.
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The only real influence I have had was myself.
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In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.
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The technical obstacles of painting perhaps dictate this form. It derives also from the limitations of personality, and such may be the simplifications that I have attempted.
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They are in a high key, somewhat like impressionism or a modified impressionism. I think I'm still an impressionist.
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Jo, his wife, remarked on Hopper's painting 'Cape Cod morning', 1950: 'It is a woman looking out to see if the weather is good enough to hang out her wash'. Then Edward Hopper reacted: 'did I say that? You're making it Norman Rockwell. From my point of view she's just looking out the window, just looking out the window'.
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I was always interested in architecture, but the editors of the magazines who demanded these subjects for the illustrations of Hopper wanted people waving with their arms.
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The whole answer is there on the canvas.
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It is hard for me to know what to paint. It comes slowly.
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The killing of the horses a bullfight in Madrid, he visited in June 1910 by the bull is very horrible, much more so as they have no chance to escape and are ridden up to the bull to be butchered.. ..the entry of the bull into the ring however is very beautiful; his surprise and the first charges he makes are very pretty.
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I believe that the great painters with their intellect as master have attempted to force this unwilling medium of paint and canvas into a record of their emotions. I find any digression from this large aim leads me to boredom.
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One must perhaps qualify this statement and say that seemingly opposite tendencies each contain some modicum of the other. I have tried to present my sensations in what is the most congenial and impressive form possible to me.
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It's probably a reflection of my own, if I may say, loneliness. I don't know. It could be the whole human condition.
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Though I studied with Robert Henri, I was never a member of the Ash-Can School. You see, it had a sociological trend which didn't interest me. Hopper then proceeded to inform Kuh that his work contained no social content whatsoever!
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Originality is neither a matter of inventiveness nor method, it is the essence of personality.
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After I took up etchings c. 1915, my paintings seemed to crystallize.
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Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist, and this inner life will result in his personal vision of the world.. .The inner life of a human being is a vast and varied realm.
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I could just go a few steps from the house where he stayed in Paris in 1906- 1907 and I'd see the Louvre across the river. From the corner of the Rue de Bac and Lille (sic) you could see Sacré-Coeur. It hung like a great vision in the air above the city.
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If this end is unattainable, so, it can be said, is perfection in any other ideal of painting or in any other of man's activities.