Cape Cod Evening

There is so much to like about the paintings by Edward Hopper. Probably one of his more famous works is Nighthawks, a painting of a diner scene with 4 characters, each with their own story. Apparently that scene was inspired by a restaurant in Greenwich Village. There's something about that painting that is familiar, the mood, the setting and the people in there.


Look at Nighthawks. You can see the painting and hear NPR's Scott Simon report on Nighthawks and its painter. As part of Present at the Creation, NPR's ongoing series on the origins of American icons, "...Simon looks at how an image that most people take for granted in their daily lives has become one of America's most famous pieces of art."


There is a painting by Hopper called, Rooms By the Sea and at first glance, it looks just like a door opening up to the sea. Click here to see it- Rooms by the Sea. Look at the back wall- the greyish whitish one- how can put two completely different colors together like that and make it look as though they are on one plane? Look at floor, see that greenish yellowish color, isn't it something how you completely believe that it is the sunlight, even though the colors are completely different? In an interview with Hopper, he said, "...'I guess I'm not very human. All I really want to do is paint light on the side of a house.'"

Hopper is so brillant with light and angles and I love the way he expresses American life- its isolation and its landscapes. One of my favorite paintings is called Cape Cod Evening. One summer I found myself constantly looking at that painting and alot of Hopper's work, so I wanted to learn his process. I think you can learn an incredible amount by looking and really studying a painting but even more if you try and paint it yourself. I painted a version of Hopper's Cape Cod Evening and although it isn't anything as grand as the original I learned so much about it, like how much white he uses within his work. Like those trees in the background and the wheat in the foreground. I went through two big tubes of white while painting this one. You can see the original here. We went to see the original Cape Cod Evening at the National Gallery of Art in D.C. and I was struck at how different the original was from the prints in books, like the trees look so blue in prints but in the original, the trees are greener. Over this summer, I am going to take some of the photographs from our trip across the Unied States and work on painting some of the scenes. I like how Hopper found the beauty in American life.