#realsim

Edward Hopper, Summer in the City, 1949. Oil on canvas.

"Part of why I like this is the title; you can feel the heat. You can imagine being somewhere like New York when it's 100 degrees. This couple look as though they've just had really bad sex, again. She wants to leave him and he doesn't want to carry on like this. He looks dead, like a corpse. She just looks terribly sad. There's nothing there any more. 'I don't like fucking my husband any more,' is not a subject people talk about at dinner parties and Edward Hopper is making a painting about it. At the time that was really radical. The yellow light coming in is depressing, there's nothing happy about this picture. It's more like a play."

     —Tracey Emin in The Times of London, 2015

Conquer.

[Gift for @swingingcrab }

I decided to draw these guys at school today.

Edward Hopper, Conference at Night, 1949. Oil on canvas.

Numerous critics and exhibitions have documented the influence of stage sets and popular American cinema upon Hopper’s depictions of the urban scene, often citing this image as a prime example. Film historian Peter Wollen identified Conference at Night as one of many Hopper paintings that look like scenes in movies that one has come in on in mid-screening. The viewer feels that the vignette must have a before and after; it feels like a momentary flash in an on-going mystery. Writer and Hopper’s close friend Brian O’Doherty noted that Conference directly referenced the hallmarks of the era’s popular gangster movies, or film noir, in its lighting, bleak urban setting and hard-faced characters.

This painting is classic Hopper in its theme of voyeuristic glimpses of the city at night and its masterful exposition of such favored compositional devices as an open window, a near-empty room in a utilitarian structure, strongly-directed light from an unseen source, and anonymous figures engaged in some undefined yet intense social exchange to create an arresting psychological drama. Conference at Night furnishes one of the four superb examples of work in the Wichita Art Collection by an artist who is one of the greats of 20th century painting.

Sign of the Season, 9/7/17 #8x10 gelatin silver contact print