fiefoe

'Early Sunday Morning'

The silence and plainness of the best paintings by Edward Hopper repel commentary.
One of the subliminal sources of Early Sunday Morning's otherworldliness is the peculiar vantage: we and the painter seem to be suspended at the level of the second-story sills, too close to be across the street and yet higher than street level.
When one looks for what makes Hopper's paintings, so apparently ordinary in their subject matter, so extraordinary in the tension they evoke, the secret is often in their staginess.
There is a theatrical gesture in shelter itself, dividing light from dark, inside from outside.
(The dawn) arrives stealthily, while the windows still sleep... as the day, like an ambitious merchant, is already setting up shop.
a largeness of patience and peripheral vision, a largeness that includes on the canvas the data of time and of elemental, generally unmet need
The barber pole is cheerful, the hydrant basks like a sluggish, knobby toad.
Hopper's apparently noncommittal art excels in making us aware of the elsewhere, the missing, the longed-for. He is.. a master of suspense.

'Better than Nature'

... Ryder's cracking, shrinking, wrinkling, bubbling, sagging, darkening, alligatoring agglutinations of pigment. His paintings are subject to "traction crackle," "varnish slide," and "perennial plastic flow"; they suffer from an ongoing chemical activity that insurance companies term "inherent vice."
(nature)'s uncomplaining susceptibility to accident
His heedless techniques, the dim melodrama of his fairy-tale tableaux, and his decay into grubby eccentricity and counterproductive obsessiveness all conspire to suggest that Rider.. (as) our holy fool of painting. Puritanism... values sincerity and prefers to a suspect facility like John Singer Sargent's a definite awkwardness... Puritanism admires, as ultimate proof of sincerity, self-destruction.
His anecdotal paintings .. speak in a hoarse whisper.
It's a measure of our nervous relation with his erratic talent that we are relieved he has broguht off what, after all, any competent illustrator could have.

"Still Looking" (Reply)