In every artist's development the germ of a later work is always found in the earlier.
I think a great deal of contemporary painting doesn't have that element(decaying from your original idea) in it at all.It is all cerebral invention.Inventions not conceived in the imagination at all...contemporary painting is false..it has no intimacy.
To me form,color and design are merely a means to an end....I am interested primarily in the vast field of experience and sensation.
Invention...is the essence of personality.
...all the sweltering, tawdry life of the American small town, and behind all, the sad desolation of our suburban landscape.
I can’t always agree with what critics say – it may be true; it may not be true.
I can't exactly describe the sensations, but they're entirely human and perhaps have nothing to do with aesthetics.
Whom did I meet? Nobody. I'd heard of Gertrude Stein, but I don't remember having heard of Picasso at all. I used to go to the cafés at night and sit and watch. I went to the theatre a little. Paris had no great or immediate impact on me.
Maybe I am slightly inhuman ... all I ever wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house.
No amount of skillful invention can replace the essential element of imagination.
Unconsciously, probably, I was painting the loneliness of a large city.
The man's the work. Something doesn't come out of nothing.
I am interested primarily in the vast field of experience and sensation.
Why I select certain subjects rather than others ,I do not exactly know,unless it is that I believe them to be the best medium for a synthesis of my inner experience.
John Updike, as quoted in 'How Edward Hopper Saw the Light', by Joseph Phelan, at Artcyclopedia
Hopper's best pictures are representational only in that simplified, stripped-down, visually dissonant manner that suggests some distant memory, or a dream.... They are simple, yet mysterious; blunt, yet poetic; familiar, yet at the same time inscrutable.
