Edward Hopper - Painting Quotes

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It is true that the Impressionists perhaps gave a more faithful representation of nature through their discoveries in out-of-door painting. But that they increased their statute as artists by so doing is controversial.... If the technical innovations of the Impressionists led merely to a more accurate representation of nature, it was perhaps of not much value in enlarging their powers of expression.

Edward Hopper
Painting will have to deal more fully and less obliquely with life and nature's phenomena before it can again become great.

Edward Hopper
My aim in painting has always been the most exact transcription possible of my most intimate impressions of nature.

Edward Hopper
After I took up etchings [c. 1915], my paintings seemed to crystallize.

Edward Hopper
The trend in some of the contemporary movements in art, but by no means all, seems to deny this ideal and to me appears to lead to a purely decorative conception of painting.

Edward Hopper
About his painting 'Approaching a CityWell' Hopper painted in 1946:
I've always been interested in approaching a big city in a train, and I can't exactly describe the sensations, but they're entirely human and perhaps have nothing to do with aesthetics. There is a certain fear and anxiety and a great visual interest in the things that one sees coming into a great city. I think that's about all I can say about it.

Edward Hopper
The idea [for his painting 'Room in New York', he painted in 1932] had been in my mind a long time before I painted it. It was suggested by glimpses of lighted interiors seen as I walked along city streets at night, probably near the district where I live [Washington Square, New York] although it's no particular street or house, but is really a synthesis of many impressions.

Edward Hopper
Jo, his wife, remarked on Hopper's painting 'Cape Cod morning', 1950: 'It is a woman looking out to see if the weather is good enough to hang out her wash'. Edward Hopper reacted:
'did I say that? You're making it Norman Rockwell. From my point of view she's just looking out the window, just looking out the window'.

Edward Hopper
Well, I have a very simple method of painting. It's to paint directly on the canvas without any funny business, as it were, and I use almost pure turpentine to start with, adding oil as I go along until the medium becomes pure oil. I use as little oil as I can possibly help, and that's my method. It's very simple... Yes, linseed oil. I used to use poppy oil, but I have heard that poppy oil is given to cracking pigment too, so I use it no longer... I find linseed oil and white lead the most satisfactory mediums.

Edward Hopper
Just to paint a representation or design is not hard, but to express a thought in painting is. Thought is fluid. What you put on canvas is concrete, and it tends to direct the thought. The more you punt on canvas the more you lose control of the thought. I've never been able to paint what I set out to paint.

Edward Hopper
If this end is unattainable, so, it can be said, is perfection in any other ideal of painting or in any other of man's activities.

Edward Hopper
The technical obstacles of painting perhaps dictate this form. It derives also from the limitations of personality, and such may be the simplifications that I have attempted.

Edward Hopper
I wish I could paint more.. I do dozens of sketches for oils.. if I do one that interests me I go on to make a painting but that happens only two or three times a year.

Edward Hopper
There may come, or perhaps has come, a time when no further progress in truthful representation is possible. There are those who say that such a point has been reached, an attempt to substitute a more and more simplified and decorative calligraphy. This direction is sterile and without hope to those who wish to give painting a richer and more human meaning and a wider scope. No one can correctly forecast the direction that painting will take in the next few years, but to me at least there seems to be a revulsion against the invention of arbitrary and stylized design.

Edward Hopper