(?) Ed Hopper, how do you do it.

[jmal]

@ Dave Wooten

You're welcome. I too love Hopper's work and have often sought scenes similar to his paintings. And, contrary to some others here, I see nothing wrong with this at all. I do things because I like doing them, not for some sort of attempt at new/innovative/unexplored artistic territory. Whatever comes of my simple pursuits is fine, whether it is immitative or something grander.

Jmal

 

[Larry Bullis]

@ Dave Wooten

You're welcome. I too love Hopper's work and have often sought scenes similar to his paintings. And, contrary to some others here, I see nothing wrong with this at all. I do things because I like doing them, not for some sort of attempt at new/innovative/unexplored artistic territory. Whatever comes of my simple pursuits is fine, whether it is immitative or something grander.

Jmal

Dave,

A rough quote from Minor White, from my memory: "Everything's been photographed. Do it better."

While I might say that I'm not interested in emulation, that is generally true, but I've had to think about it. In one of my grad school stints, one of my most brilliant art history teachers, the AMAZING and WONDERFUL Martha Kingsbury at U of Washington, gave us a choice. We could either write papers and take tests, or we could do work "in the manner of" artists we were studying. The art history students all opted for papers and exams (can you even imagine!) and us studio folks did the other. I learned one heck of a lot from the exercise. Of course, Martha, the sly one, tricked us into writing papers too without even knowing we were doing it. Very clever teacher.

I think that we seem somehow to need to attribute too much of ourselves to what we do, being unwilling to recognize that we aren't the super special beings that we like to think we are. Is this surprising? We spend our lifetime developing an ego that is labeled with name and now lots of numbers, and each of us is the center of our world. Each of the 6.8 billion of us. Why do we need this? Why not relax a bit?

What could be wrong with consciously producing work with the aim of looking like something Hopper might have done, instead of perhaps UNCONSCIOUSLY aping some other source? The likelihood of doing something "original" is really very slight for any of us on any given day. Our chances are enhanced when we go off on some notion we had, but why can't the idea of replicating Hopper, or Picasso, or Warhol, or ? be just as likely to produce that spark that ignites some new direction that we are not expecting?

Go and do it. There is NOTHING at all wrong with it.

This has been a very interesting and stimulating thread.

 

[Nicholas Lindan]

What could be wrong with consciously producing work with the aim of looking like something Hopper may have done ... The likelihood of doing something "original" is really very slight for any of us on any given day.

http://www.nolindan.com/UsenetStuff/afterlindan.jpg

 

[GraemeMitchell]

Nathaniel Goldberg shot a Hooper inspired feature on Ryan Gosling awhile back for GQ magazine. It was well executed. See the second pic down here.

 

[df cardwell]

Cool feature in the New York Times Travel Section:

It may need a subscription,
but if you can catch a paper or the online version, it is interesting.

Cape Cod, in Edward Hopper’s Light
http://travel.nytimes.com/2008/08/10/travel/10cultured.html

And related Graphics,
August 10, 2008
Edward Hopper’s Cape Cod: Then and Now
The iconic American artist spent nearly half the summers of his life painting isolated buildings in broad vistas. See how some of these landscapes have changed and hear what they mean to the people who live there
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/08/10/travel/20080810_HOPPER_FEATURE.html?8dpc

 

[Nicholas Lindan]

New York Times Travel Section ... Cape Cod, in Edward Hopper’s Light

Aaaarrrrggghhh. Oh, well. I have a program with a feature called "Auto Van Gogh": It 'repaints' a photograph so it looks like splodges of paint. If the user paints in splodges (and he doesn't have to even paint), he must be the new Van Gogh.

Maybe there will be a plug in for PhotoShop: "Easy Edward Hopper", it would come with a sun-rise/set calculator and a compass.

There are programs made for detecting forgery by doing a fractal analysis of the image - picking up brush strokes, detail to area ratios, tone change frequencies, adjacent tone statistic, etc., etc. Interestingly, they don't detect forgery at all well for someone who knows what he is looking at because they don't detect art. But for the common public, if the program passes it then they will 'swear it is real'.

For Hopper:

Lighten and saturate blues.
Desaturate reds and greens.
Remove detail from red areas.
Shift yellows to orange.
Reduce contrast.
Reverse the shifts for night scenes by fluorescent light.

 

[Dave Wooten]

Good points Bowzart,

Thanks Graeme Mitchell

Thanks DF Cardwell

 

[Larry Bullis]

My thanks to you. It was a very stimulating thread.

 

[Videbaek]

I like Hopper, how sad his pictures are and how he stays just on the right side of kitsch.

As for the following:

<<A rough quote from Minor White, from my memory: "Everything's been photographed. Do it better."<<

I'll always come out and directly contradict this kind of shopworn, braindead statement -- almost always,
it's mouthed by a photographer. Very significantly, almost never by a painter.

No. Everything has not been photographed. Only a tiny fraction of one per cent of the infinite universe
of possible ideas has been photographed. If you say everything has been photographed, you are merely
admitting that your well of imagination has run dry. So be it, but speak for yourself and not for others.

This is equally of every field of artistic endeavour. It is always possible to be entirely new and
entirely original. It is up to the imagination.

 

[Larry Bullis]

I just found this upcoming show at the Seattle Art Museum, and thought that if anyone is still out there, it might be of interest. Hopper was not JUST interested in isolation.

http://www.seattleartmuseum.org/exhibit/exhibitDetail.asp?eventID=14365