I Look At This Painting Everyday
Edward Hopper’s perfectly painted dilemma, but what exactly is it?
For a few years now, I’ve had a postcard of this painting tacked to my study wall. It’s called Pennsylvania coal town and it was made by Edward Hopper in 1947.
Whenever I stop my work and look up at this painting, I can’t help but feel that Hopper painted something I recognise. I don’t know exactly what it is, but I recognise it anyway. He got it right, which is a very vague way of saying that he found something which is essentially true about being alive.
Whatever this truth is, it has nothing especially to do with coal mining in Pennsylvania, not for me at least. I’ve never been to Pennsylvania; that’s not the world I live in. But it does have something to do with a man raking his front lawn and the sun beginning to set, and with the way he pauses for a second, looking out to the distance. It is a truth captured in the particular spacing between the two houses, whose fronts are in shadow and whose sides are bathed in the yellow light of the late afternoon.
It is an instant of human behaviour we can probably all identify with. The man has stopped midway through a mundane task, gazing off beyond the canvas — and in a sense, beyond his own life.
