A Question of Light and Dark

Edward Hopper is the painter of both summer days and nights for me; even more so than Fairfield Porter, with whom I also associate this particular season, albeit with its less brooding aspects. Hopper’s Cape Cod plays its part in this for me, naturally, but for the most part it is the peculiar melancholic quality of his strangely undecided landscapes that tips the summer scales, so accurately evoking, as these pictures often do, the special disenchantments and regrets of those June, July, and August days past, present, and no doubt yet to come. It would have been interesting to visit that lighthouse, the paintings seem to say, but dark hints of de Chirican mysteriousness were lurking in the shadows, and so we silently agreed it would be better to return to our motel and just stare at the wall instead; or it might have been nice to sit and talk on the porch tonight, but it was too much like hanging around on a movie set waiting for the director to call “action’, so she just went to bed and I read the paper; or it’s so hot I think I’ll strip all my clothes off and stand facing the window.
Been there, done that. Every summer.
And then there is the absence of people in many of Hopper’s paintings: everybody leaves the city during the hot weather, except me of course, left alone in the abandoned world with only secretive and suspicious architecture for company. Anthony Powell caught the mood well in A Buyer’s Market: “Everyone appeared to be away. A sense of isolation, at least when out of the office, had become oppressive, and I began to feel myself a kind of hermit, threading his way eternally through deserted and sultry streets, never again to know a friend.”
Ah. What a terrible curse to be found contemplating the disappointment of summer when summer has not even properly yet begun.