Weekend Words: Power of Painting

“If you could say it in words there would be no reason to paint.”

American painter and printmaker Edward Hopper (1882 – 1967) said a lot without words. In Hopper’s famous Nighthawks, you can feel the isolation of the customers sitting at an all-night diner. He often painted common features of American life in a style which communicated loneliness. Hopper studied with New York’s so-called Ashcan School and traveled to Paris several times where he focused on realism rather than the cubist style of the time. He painted urban scenes from a gas station to Victorian buildings. As he put it, “Maybe I am not very human – what I wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house.”

His widow bequeathed thousands of his oils, watercolors, prints and other work to the Whitney Museum of American Art. You can learn about his influence and see his paintings at National Gallery of Art site.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *