Lines, patterns and lighting prompted photographing and photoshopping this image.
The following two paintings of interiors by Edward Hopper served as inspiration:
While I appreciate Hopper’s genius, I don’t feel like buying into how his paintings make me feel – a persisting, nagging sense of solitude/loneliness.
So far, my images, shown here on A&P, activate different emotions in my limbic system. Some of my pictures, similar to Hopper’s art, do remind me of solitude. But others remind me of strength, whimsy, or even appeal to my intellect. I don’t feel like getting into groove.
I am curious how other artists deal with the emotional impact of their pictures. Continuing in their artform – painting, photography, textile art – do they get easily trapped into a particular emotional state ?
Birgit:
I’ve never before dealt with someone who draws the limbic system into a discussion of art. But then I don’t get around much.
Subject matter doesn’t tend to get me going. I will avoid sublimity for the challenges it presents and sentimentality as treacherous. What does hit me is that feeling of drawing neigh to an extra-normality which I have mentioned, and which I find just about everywhere I look in Hinduism and Buddhism. Sometimes admixtures of stimuli add to this as last night I was listening to Dvorak and smelling one of my favorite mixtures of essential oils (lavender and orange) while steering colored glop around. Of course the glop will not evoke so on the morning after and the somber assessment introduces a very different set of emotions.
You present an element of the artist’s presence that I hadn’t considered. In the photo you are there in common with your subject – more than once it appears. Your being there is occasioned by the fact of the image. The artifice of Hopper’s paintings suggests that the figures depicted are more a product of his intent and imagination and may have been culled from a broad range of experiences. No generalizations, just a comment about your specific juxtaposition.
Is the figure of the man to the right in a mirror? Is he in the room behind you? My first impression is yes, but then I see the grain of the flooring taking off in a contrary direction. So it is left as unresolved, and the better for it.
Finally, I like the slight angle of the rug in the foreground and its resonance with the angle of the blinds over the window.
Hi Jay,
I did leave that little bit of rug in the foreground on purpose but hadn’t quite realized that its importance was to resonate with the line of the shade. The figure to the right is photoshopped rather than mirrored.
Interesting juxtaposition: sentimentality and sublimity! Sublimity, according to Webster’s on line dictionary, means: grandeur, magnanimousness, nobility. I would not have explained it that way. To me, sublimity means the extra-normality that you refer to.
The artifice of Hopper’s paintings suggests that the figures depicted are more a product of his intent and imagination and may have been culled from a broad range of experiences. Is that still a difference between photography and painting considering how easy it is to copy and paste into photographs and how easy it is to distort people such as tightening a models waistline?
I too love lavender and orange fragrance. I once had an orange tree that perfumed the entire house. And Lavender – Troels asked to grow something besides lavender outside, aroma therapy. With respect to the limbic system, I once worked on it, decades ago, during a sabbatical with the author of Molecules of Emotion.
Birgit:
Yes, ‘limbic’. As in I was getting all limbic what with my Dvorak, essential oils and all. it becomes tangled in my mind with iambic and limbo, and may hark back to some common source.
Photography tends to stay out at the ends of my arms. I can make any number of alterations and adjustments to an image, but it always seems like a process mediated at some remove.
By the way, what is that floor of yours made of?
Jay,
Brazilian Cherry, Mountain grade. In South America, this wood is supposedly used to make crates. The high grade is a solid dark red.
I also have a Dvorak experience: The ‘New World’ performed in Tuebingen on November 22, 1963 was interrupted with a speaker coming to the podium announcing the US event.
Birgit:
Crates or no, that’s a great look.
My Kennedy moment was spent eating a pb&j while waiting to be drafted into the military. Far more prosaic.