Edward Hopper

I first saw one of Edward Hooper's work in the Chicago art museum. It was his painting of a couple in a dinner late at night. My bestfriend whom I was with commented that the painting was so lonely. It did feel that way to me too. But I was struck at how he could elicit that feeling of "loneliness" through his paintings; surrounding a lighted area with either darkness, uninhabited spaces, walls or forests. In a book I borrowed from the library, I found that he also uses roads in a "lonely" kind of way, having them lead to nowhere or are have them barren or filled with a lot of overgrowing grass. In his simple painting of a woman below, I am struck at how much he could achieve with just variety of colors.