Comments on: Keeping shadows light

By: Mac

Mac — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 18:19:53 +0000

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).

By: neo-neocon

neo-neocon — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 18:03:27 +0000

Harold: man, that’s what I call focus! Amazing stuff.

By: Harold

Harold — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 17:52:07 +0000

By: Lorenz Gude

Lorenz Gude — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 14:40:21 +0000

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!

By: sergey

sergey — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 09:56:17 +0000

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!).

By: waltj

waltj — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 06:19:17 +0000

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.

By: neo-neocon

neo-neocon — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 02:11:58 +0000

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.

By: beverly

beverly — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 01:58:34 +0000

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.

By: Otiose

Otiose — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 01:40:32 +0000

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.

By: Webutante

Webutante — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 00:23:16 +0000

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.