Word: hopperful
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Rooms for Tourists, like most of Hopper's work, has the strange clarity of something seen once for an instant by a passing driver. It is a familiar vision without any of the dullness familiarity brings. The house looms sharply in the long darkness of the night, and the light shining from its windows is warm as bed. The impression, and the invitation, are instantaneous; the road leads on past...
...road cuts across the foreground of most of Hopper's paintings. Sometimes it becomes a city street, or a railroad embankment, or a porch step, but it is there-a constant reminder of transience...
Born 65 years ago in Nyack, N.Y., Hopper has been following the painter's road for nearly half a century. He was lucky enough to study with Robert Henri, whose "Ashcan School" of urban realism neatly fitted his own natural bent, and he later made three trips to Paris (where he imitated the impressionists but made no contact with young moderns like Picasso). For a long time Hopper's road was a rocky one. He sold only two paintings in 23 years, supported himself by doing commercial illustrations, which he hated. Says Hopper: "I was a rotten illustrator...
...Impulse. Hopper did not hit his stride until middle age, when sudden fame as an interpreter of the American scene-a sort of Theodore Dreiser in art-freed him. Nowadays, Hopper and his wife, who keeps her own painting studiously in the background, can afford a house on Cape Cod as well as their Manhattan studio apartment overlooking Washington Square...
...wish I could paint more," Hopper says. "I get sick of reading and going to the movies. I'd much rather be painting all the time, but I don't have the impulse. Of course I do dozens of sketches for oils-just a few lines on yellow typewriter paper-and then I almost always burn them. If I do one that interests me, I go on and make a painting, but that happens only two or three times a year...