Hopper

Chris Cartmill came and spoke to our class. I liked him, thought he was enthusiastic. So I signed up for his fall class.

I think he had a point about Hopper, but is Hopper really the first to attempt to capture a scene? It seems to me that the whole of art, at least the whole of contemporary art, exists in "peering through windows." I think any great work of art can be interpreted in different ways by different viewers.

Don't get me wrong. I like Edward Hopper very much, and I like his subject matter. But I think taking a piece of art--a song, a poem, a painting, a short story--and making it into a single moment has been an idea long before the time of Hopper. Consider the "Mona Lisa". What's the most asked question about the painting? What is she thinking? Why is she smiling? And a hundered different people will interpret it in just as many ways, "she's happy," "she's sad," etc. I like to think of all paintings as windows, some of them I want to look into and others I don't. But it stands to reason that art exists for this sole purpose, to invoke a separate and distinct feeling in each curious onlooker.