Word: hoppered
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...REALITY OF EDWARD HOPPER...
...postgreenhouse future. The ice caps have melted, and the world is a vast briny sea. Most people live in giant docking stations, atolls, built on water. Prowling the sea like Poseidon's angels are the Smokers, bad guys led by the one-eyed Deacon (Dennis Hopper). The Smokers are looking for Enola (Tina Majorino), a 10-year-old with a map tattoo that may point the way to dry land. With her guardian Helen (Jeanne Tripplehorn), the girl hitches a ride on the trimaran of an outsider--part man, part fish--known as the Mariner (Costner). If anyone in this...
...Hopper excelled in painting, discreetly and from without, people who are outsiders to one another. You imagine him staring from the Second Avenue El as it rattled past the lit brownstone windows, storing the enigmatic snapshots of home and business for later use. These are reconstructed scenes, emotion recollected in tranquility. In Room in New York, 1932, it is night; a man reads a paper at a round table, a woman turns away in her own absorption and boredom, touching the piano keyboard with one finger. They are out of synch, and their distance from each other is figured...
...doubt Hopper saw something like this, yet not very like it. The space would not have been measured by his three exact and conscious patches of red: the armchair, the woman's dress, the lampshade. The figures would have been remote. In the picture they are large, and we are close to them, outside their window. You don't for a moment imagine Hopper on a scaffold outside the window or spying on the couple through a long lens. And yet the painting does evoke the pleasure, common to bird and people watchers, of seeing while being unnoticed; it does...
...Hopper gives us a created world, not one that is merely recorded. Everything in it is shaped by memory, sympathy, distance and formal imperatives. Nothing is there merely because it "was there." Mark Rothko hated diagonals, but loved Hopper's. Richard Diebenkorn loved diagonals and loved Hopper's too. As well anyone might: the diagonal, the slanting patch (especially of light) becomes a wonderfully expressive element in Hopper, acting both as a structural brace for the actual painted surface and as a sign of fugitive reality in imagined space. In Morning Sun, 1952, you are acutely aware that...