edward hopper: western motel (1957)

As mentioned in my previous post, one of my favourite painters is Edward Hopper. Aside from an aesthetic appreciation of realism, he was an artist who lived at a time (and in a place) that was very dynamic, exciting and fuelled by an optimism for the future. Engineering -- the dream of Leviathan in steel -- soared ever upward to meet the true blue of democratic skies, spanning once unfordable waters and chewed up miles of prairie between its locomotive jaws so that the California Zephyr and the Commodore Vanderbuilt could glide onto the marbled Roman concourse of Union Station. With the automobile revolution Americans began to explore their own vast continent: bitumen adventurers in synthetic fabrics driving the wheel into a new and savage topography -- overnighting on atolls of neon and paleolithic airconditioning. Early to mid-century America.

Western Motel was painted in 1957, which is towards the tail-end of this era. The scale of the room is American. The window exagerrated in a gesture of modernism through which we see a prairie/desert landscape. Hopper strategically places his characters within the frame of the portrait to suggest a certain ambiguity or dualism: tension. It is as if we are seeing a subject just before or after a climactic event. In some of his paintings it seems almost as if the real action is just out of frame -- unseen. This is very cinematic. As with Gas (1940) featured here, the enquiring eye is lead beyond the character at the pumps of a rural gas station and deeper, inwards -- or is it outwards -- around the bend and into the darkness. I have name-checked him a lot in my blogs but I feel that David Lynch must have studied Edward Hopper in terms of composition. Again, it's the framing.

Hopper was often perceived as being a symbolist because the positioning and the expression of his characters often suggested an acute detachment. In retrospect it perhaps suggested an emotional and psychological distancing in a rapidly modernising world that would eventually herald a New World dystopia. However, Hopper's real passion was not symbolism but sunlight. Look at how the western sun hits the wall above the spartan motel bed. I'm sure he thought very hard about this: the intrusion of light.

The subject of this painting stares directly at the viewer: resolute, anticipatory, almost captive. The Buick parked outside -- and which seems to protude from her breast -- is as much an oceanic creature from the depths of the Mariana Trench as it is an automobile. A goggled-eyed green alien. This is why she is still waiting, the suitcases already packed. She is not, in fact, alone. It is not really the viewer she is focused on, but her husband who is photographing this tableau. He holds the keys to the car, mobility, freedom.