As a painter and a painting teacher, Hoppers work is a real problem for me.
On one hand, his paint handling is terrible. He spreads paint on the canvas like icing sugar on a cake. All the nuance of application I teach he happily ignores… no scumbling, glazing, tonking etc. The way he paints figures is also terrible. They look stiff and unnatural, like they have been stuffed.
On the other hand, he is a genuine poet. But His visual poetry owes nothing to European traditions. It comes from the cinema and from photography, a true American creation. A classic.
The outcome is an artist who is easy to like but hard to learn from. He succeeds on his own unique terms and by a narrow margin. I sigh when one of my students discovers him. I have to find a way to say that hopper could pull it off, but almost certainly you can’t.
On one hand, his paint handling is terrible. He spreads paint on the canvas like icing sugar on a cake. All the nuance of application I teach he happily ignores… no scumbling, glazing, tonking etc. The way he paints figures is also terrible. They look stiff and unnatural, like they have been stuffed.
On the other hand, he is a genuine poet. But His visual poetry owes nothing to European traditions. It comes from the cinema and from photography, a true American creation. A classic.
The outcome is an artist who is easy to like but hard to learn from. He succeeds on his own unique terms and by a narrow margin. I sigh when one of my students discovers him. I have to find a way to say that hopper could pull it off, but almost certainly you can’t.