Light and Shade

Although Hopper is now regarded as a major American realist painter, he was already in his early forties when he first received general recognition for a solo exhibition in 1924. The success of this show of watercolours enabled him to give up the work he hated as a commercial illustrator and concentrate on his painting.

Hopper's paintings are rooted in the contemporary everyday life of urban America: hotel rooms, gas stations, diners, automats, movie theatres, railroads. Hopper himself commented, "I don't think I ever tried to paint the American scene; I'm trying to paint myself." He also depicted the landscapes of New England, where he spent the summers with his artist wife, Jo Nivelsen. Both cityscapes and landscapes express a vision of modern life as filled with loneliness: his figures, even when in company, are solitary, lost in their own thoughts, disaffected. There is no eye contact between the actors. Their faces are blank and expressionless. Rather the mood of unease and desolation is conveyed by patterns of light and shade, flat empty areas, a lack of detail, and stark settings, the action suspended in time.

One of the most characteristic of Hopper's visual motifs is the window - curtain fluttering, open and with sunlight streaming in, or illuminated like a cinema screen in the dark night. Windows are a threshold between public and private worlds, between exterior and interior lives. They signify a transitional state. They are also framing devices that capture a mise-en-scène, a stage set, a film still, a frozen moment. In fact Hopper's paintings have influenced many filmmakers like Alfred Hitchcock and David Lynch, as well as writers and other artists.

By conveying symbolic states of being that are both metaphysical and psychological, Hopper's paintings transcend illustration and resist simple narrative interpretation. One of his last paintings was "Sun in an Empty Room", 1963. When asked what the painting was about, Hopper responded simply, "Myself"