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Rooms By The Sea by Edward Hopper hangs at the Yale University Art Gallery. I have never seen this painting in person, but a copy of it has hung at my house for years. There is a door opening onto water, a picture on the wall, carpet, a tall set of drawers or maybe a cabinet, and a sofa. And there is light. The only things that are thoroughly representational are the door handle and the strike plate. The strange part is that there are no stairs to the water, it looks like there is a straight drop.
Another way to see the picture is to look at the blocks of color. At the bottom there is an oddly shaped block of avocado green. Above it is a block of very light yellow, a block of off-white (shaded towards black), and above that is a block of gray. As your eyes move around the painting, you see other blocks of colors. Even the sea is mostly flat blue with just hits of white foam. It is a tribute to the human eye that even without knowing the name of the painting, we have no trouble converting those blocks of color into something representational.
Good writers show, they don’t tell. In the same, way, good artists show us something, they don’t tell us what to think or how to understand. Hopper has reduced the amount of information in the painting a great deal, and still left us with a clear image. The rooms are empty, they have no personality. That emptiness invites the viewer to fill them with purpose, or not, perhaps just to contemplate the emptiness.
This painting by the American Milton Avery, Sheep, works the same way. The figure is recognizable as a sheep, in part because of the wool, but there isn’t any detail. Douglas Hofstadter addresses a similar question, how do we recognize letters, in his wonderful book Metamagical Themas. See .pdf page 3 of 19, here. I think the answer is I don’t know.
On the other hand, take a look at this painting by the American Helen Frankenthaler, Seeing the Moon on a Hot Summer Day. The figure on the right is holding a pipe and looking at the moon. There is a figure below the moon that doesn’t look like much of anything, maybe a mountain, with a tiny figure on top, maybe a glacier, who knows.
For each of us there is some level of abstraction which gives us enough to work with, enough to inspire thought or emotion, without being totally frustrating, say like IKB 191 by Yves Klein, which hangs at the Pompidou. Rooms by the Sea is enough for me. The Avery and the Frankenthaler are edging away.
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Last week I wrote about Louis XIII Comes of Age, by Peter Paul Rubens. I went to the Rubens Room yesterday and took another look, partly because my memory of the painting was different from the photo in the post. The painting is darker than I remembered, and is not as precise as I recalled. The photo is accurate. I checked, person1597, and there is no hint of a five o’clock shadow; the lad is, however, quite callow.
11 Comments
The light — I don’t know how he did it, he is a master with depicting light.
I’m so absorbed by the light and how it falls on the interior that I don’t notice the door appears to open directly over the water, as if being by the sea is merely an afterthought.
Great painting.
It reminds me of an interview I watched with cinematographer William A. Fraker. Discussing the filming of Rosemary’s Baby, he said he didn’t understand why Roman Polanski had him set up a shot so that Ruth Gordon was half obscured while talking on the phone in the next room UNTIL he watched the movie in a theater and saw the entire audience simultaneously crane their necks attempting to peer around the door frame.
I love it! Thank U for posting it. I’m a painter myself and I have always admired Hooper’s work.
thx. lovely explanation.
Nice – love those Hopper interiors.
Hopper has a “thing” for different colors of green in the floors of a lot of his interiors. Look at these…
I suppose since I like greens very much that’s part of the attraction for me.
This painting brings to my mind a scene that is just unforgettable to me, from Kagemusha. There is an open window with the ocean, very blue-green behind it. The character in the scene makes an incredible sound as he goes through some kind of martial arts movement. I cannot forget the sound he makes in front of the square blue opening, which like this one is right in front of the water , but unlike this in that it is not a door.
Of all the scenes in that movie, this was just astonishing, to me.
I Love Avery’s animal shapes. I think there is a painting of goats on a green background that is as iconic of their form, even more purely abstract than the sheep. He really could distill a form to a shape. Fantastic.
There are many artists who have amazing drawing skills and are able to do a similar thing with just about any form.
When I was in art school, I had a teacher who used to say that we had to learn to tell a lie with our lines.
It is a lot of hard work to draw well. I have not dedicated myself to the labor of it, and I’m not a good liar as a result. But I do love good drawing. Even though we are talking about color. . .
Another thing about the painting is that Avery has made the light a positive shape in front of the door. The umbra, which is the form of the shadow, is usually what is depicted. In this case, the sun cuts the umbra and becomes a 3-D trapezoid, while the umbra goes behind the light. I don’t know if I am really able to describe this without pointing at the painting. But try to see the sun coming through the door as a shape in 3 dimensions. The lie in this story is told at the top front edge, and the front vertical corners of the two planes of the sun.
Do you see that? Check out how other painters use this.
He does give you a flat plane of the sun as it hits the wall in the rear where the painting is hung. He is making quite a purposeful contrast between those two pieces of light. He has cut the other light/shadow areas off, so these two light areas get all the attention.
I think he uses another trick with color — trick might not be the best word here, more like a device.
The sky above the ocean at the farthest upper right contains lavender tones; the lower left corner is yellow-green. We find ourselves pulled to the warmer side of the painting and not the cooler side, and above the left corner because of the red-orange. Orange is opposite blue on the color scale; blue recedes into the background.
Very compelling when cut with the lines of light.
I’m thinking there’s a mermaid in the shadows on the foremost wall. Maybe it is the absinthe…
Lots to check out with the diverse links — that AI piece looks interesting. Wait, the blue screen of death is a piece of modern art??!! I’m so screwed!
Well Louis is a naughty boy and needs his mama still. Or Cardinal Richelieu. No beard, no empire. Aww, he wasn’t that bad of King… except for that Thirty Years War thing. Hey, if it wasn’t for that little Donnybrook, half of our ancestors wouldn’t have come here in the first place. Send them back to Forbach-Baden? Nawww — I married one!
And thanks for checking on the picture details — the picture viewer I use may have been a little fuzzy that week… Knowhatimean?
It looks like shitty surf
The painting I thought of when I saw this one is Georgia O’Keeffe’s 1958 Ladder to the Moon. The idea that the moon or the sea are right there for you personally, simply and magically within your reach.
Love the google, skip and a jump to For Georgia on flickr, Miro’s 1926 Dog Barking at Moon, and Georgia in bedroom illustration by Ora Eitan from Georgia Rises.