Keeping shadows light
I’ve been reading a biography of the painter Edward Hopper. Perhaps “reading” is too strong a word; like many biographies these days, it’s way too long, in this case nearly 600 pages of text plus a ton of notes.
So I’m skimming it; I’m interested in Edward Hopper, but not that interested, and the book itself just isn’t well-written. Where have all the editors gone?
Now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, I was struck by this statement of Hopper’s, as recorded by his wife Jo in one of her diaries [“the Cape” here refers to Cape Cod, and “E.” is Edward Hopper]:
The Cape looks so brilliant. E. says it is because the shadows aren’t dark, like Maine. Shadows light, because of greater density of atmosphere. The brilliant light is diffused. A great deal of reflected light keeps shadows bright.
Hopper’s paintings were famous, and have become beloved—despite, or perhaps because of, their brooding atmosphere of solitude.
Light was one of the key ingredients. Hopper said that all he wanted to do was to “paint sunlight on a house.” He certainly did that, but I disagree with the reviewer in the NY Times that that was all Hopper did. Mere “sunlight on (or in) a house” cannot evoke moods quite like these:
And of course, one of Hopper’s most famous paintings of all is of the night and the sharp illumination of harsh indoor light:
It’s all a little gimmicky, I guess. But I think it only looks that way now that we’ve become so familiar with Hopper’s work, so much so that it seems a bit cliched.
It wasn’t a cliche at the start. And it was always heartfelt and uncontrived, which comes through loud and clear; Hopper was a difficult man and probably a loner, despite his long and troubled (and intense) marriage.
So, is the light in Maine different from that in Cape Cod? I’ve been to both many times, and I have to say I’ve not really noticed it.
But then again, I’m not Edward Hopper.
I’m certainly not Edward Hopper either, and I don’t have an opinion about the light in Cape Cod. However, I used to live in Maine, and I’ve been telling people for years — and mostly getting blank stares in response — that the light there is completely different from the softer, dimmer, almost brownish light in Central New York, where I live now. In Maine, the light is sharper and more brilliant, and colors are more intense and varied. It hadn’t occurred to me that what I have perceived as differences in the light might actually be differences in the SHADOWS. I’ll start looking more carefully and see if I can see what Hopper saw.
It’s probably a little of both, Mrs Whatsit. Reflected light does change shadows quite a bit… but light quality as filtered through air also changes color perception. Pollution or clouds, smoke or even heat, all of those will interfere with light and diffuse and/or alter colors.
Cleaner air will indeed result in darker shadows.
Oh, and tangentially, shadows are almost never *black*. They are usually blueish because they pick up most of their color from that reflected light, which is often from the sky. Not always, but most shadows we see in everyday life are blueish or purplish.
Of course, shadows in space, say on the space station, are extremely crisp, dark, and almost black.
*speaking as an art nerd, working professionally in computer art*
Neo-neocon:
If you are interested in Hopper you might be interested in HDR photography (high dynamic range). HDR is a product of digital photography and the post processing (manipulating the photograph after it’s taken) that is an integral part of digital photography now (Photoshop etc.).
Do a search on Trey Ratcliff. He has a website Stuck in Customs (http://www.stuckincustoms.com/) on which he publishes a new HDR photo each day, along with a lot of other material. He also does Trey Ratcliff’s Variety Hour on google plus (google+) and YouTube.
He is an interesting fellow. A computer programmer until five or so years ago, now a prominent photographer because of his and the public’s interest in HDR photography.
HDR photography may take some time to acquire a taste for as it is very luminous, nothing like traditional photography.
I’d be interested in your reactions to HDR as you may already be sensitized to it’s type of perspective.
Harold – That’s a great site!
It’s interesting to look at the shadows in the Hopper paintings reproduced in this post. At least as shown on my monitor, the shadows in the top picture are blue, those in the middle picture mix blues, oranges and greens, and in the bottom painting they look mostly like deep olive-y greens. Certainly, as Tesh pointed out, there’s no black. In my own decidedly-not-Hopper-esque art work, I like to use complementary colors in shadows — blues for an orange object, greens for a red object, purples for a yellow and so on, darkened so that they suggest blackness without the deadness of a true black. Whether it’s true to life, I don’t know, but it does make for a surface that’s livelier, richer and more fun to look at.
I used to live near Hopper house, its in nyack
now cameras can do similar…
they are basically imitating the eye…
ie. when you lighten the dark’s, you lower contrast.
the point being that one can display a wider range of view, on a smaller range medium, without actually having that range.
its an illusion in color and art
much like the cannons that seem to always rise in tones…
or the endless staircases of escher
or in more familiar territory, the cadences that are constructed for things like bagpipes… which basically use register jumps to seem to start the scale over, and so not seem to have such a stilted range.
🙂
its a fractal universe, you can transpose things from one area to other areas, and the most amazing thing about the mind, is that one can do that at all.
when AI can do that, not just have a conversation, or pass the Turing test in a society where current people couldn’t pass the test with past people, then AI is thinking.
By the way, Hopper and his wife were conservatives. He took no money from the government when other artists were involved in WPA projects. When FDR died, his wife said something to the effect of, “Well finally we got rid of that rascal.” I’ve loved his work since childhood. Now knowing this many years later, I love it even more.
Love this version: Boulevard of Broken Dreams
http://tinyurl.com/9fmh85p
Try this again: http://tinyurl.com/8joup5m
The visual arts have always been in a somewhat distant third place behind literature and music for me, but I’ve loved Hopper ever since I first saw his work many years ago. Nice surprise on a stressful day to see these.
Hooowiee…I wonder how much that pane of glass costs.
Hopper has a distinct, glaring painting style which I always found depressing and lonely.
I remember driving up to Yale with a good friend from outside D.C. to see a Hopper exhibit. His work never did much for me.
That last painting – of the diner at night – was the centerpiece for the ‘Nighthawks’ episode in the TV series “Dead Like Me”. I believe they used a few other Hopper paintings as dialogue props, too.
Former book editor here.
They don’t pay for us any more. Publishers, that is. I was the last staff line-editor for a famous, centuries-old academic press, and they laid me off nearly 20 years ago. I’ve been freelancing in various ways ever since.
When I started in the business, we even had four people proofread each manuscript; books were in-house for leisurely and thorough editing for at least six months. This was after being vetted and edited on the “macro-level,” Maxwell Perkins-style, by the acquiring editors.
Now it’s all about pushing “product” through the pipeline (yes, the bean-counters really do refer to books as “product,” singular). Acquiring editors read the book proposal but not the MS, or not more than a chapter or so. Freelance copy editors get it more or less directly from the author, and are paid a pittance — a penny a word — to copy edit it: but that’s just reading for typos and grammatical errors, at top speed (try 3 weeks to “edit” a 1,000-page MS, my current project!). Then BANG! it’s out there, bloat and all.
Sigh.
Webutante: I guess it depends on how much “depressing and lonely” appeals to you, because his style is definitely lonely.
I don’t find it depressing, exactly. I find it hard to describe what I find it, but the best I can say is that it’s like poetry about loneliness. It’s about something that can be depressing, but I don’t find it depressing in and of itself, because it turns it into something beautiful and universal and also mysterious. I find his art very mysterious, especially works like this.
The ability to visualize things that the rest of us can’t see is what makes an artist, well, an artist. A woman of my acquaintance was a multi-talented artist, and I once asked her, half-jokingly, what she could make from a dead tree limb that I’d pulled off my house after a storm. Apparently intrigued by the challenge, she studied it for a bit, turned it over a few times, then walked off with it, saying, “give me a couple of weeks”. When she returned, she brought with her the most beautiful, life-like carving of a cougar that I’ve ever seen, and one that took full advantage of the form and grain of the wood. Suitably impressed, I asked her how and when she had decided to sculpt the big cat. She said she had seen it in the wood almost instantly, and that bringing it out had been “easy”. For her, perhaps. There was likely a similar process behind the Maine shadows that Hopper saw immediately, but others did not.
This “vision” thing is really much more complicated and involved than most people believe. Just to see something one need pay attention to it. Brain, not eyes, creates visual perception. That is why painters are so important for culture: they see things most people don’t, and so allow us to see them too. They are reformers of our collective visual perception skills and actually change our worldview (literally!).
Well as a photographer I can say that learning to see light more consciously is a key part of our development. When I look at the Hopper linked by Neo of the woman seated on a bed looking out a window there is a patch of sunlight on the wall that is painted in such a way as to make it obvious that Hopper’s eye didn’t see the wall as a uniform color as his mind knew it was, but saw the wall as it actually was illuminated. It doesn’t take long to get that all one is photographing is light in the dark room (or in photoshop) when confronted with a grossly overexposed -or blown out – highlight. Our mind will straighten a line or treat a surface as if it was uniformly illuminated, but a more artistically developed eye will be able to see more of what is actually there. Hopper knew exactly how to share his acute experience of light.
I know one thing – I don’t forget his images!
More on HDR photography:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_dynamic_range_imaging
Wiki article on HDR photography, good overview.
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/03/10/35-fantastic-hdr-pictures/
35 HDR photographs of a variety of subjects. It will give you a better idea of how it can be applied generally.
Harold: man, that’s what I call focus! Amazing stuff.
Neo said: “I find it hard to describe what I find it, but the best I can say is that it’s like poetry about loneliness. It’s about something that can be depressing, but I don’t find it depressing in and of itself, because it turns it into something beautiful and universal and also mysterious.”
Yes, exactly. I concluded some time back that the one thing that all the art I like best has in common is that it conveys a sense of the mysterious (to me–what does that for me doesn’t necessarily for other people, naturally).