My humble aim is to collect here a small, but representative gallery with my favourite works by Hopper along with the comments made by my sister Ari about some of them, on the posts I published months ago on G+ with these same works. She was in hospital then, feeling quite sick, but still communicative; and she wrote some opinions worth to read.

Even though she only commented on a portion of the paintings, she spent long whiles watching them and thinking about them, and I know that those were nice whiles. To her -as well as to me-, Hopper was an old “acquaintance” since childhood, because our parents had a very good reproduction of “The Long Leg”, in oil on canvas and actual size, in our dinning-room. Our dad also had a great book on Hopper, with many illustrations of his paintings.

-Another subtle lesson on loneliness … This other couple being again miles apart in spite of sharing the same room… The painter portrayed himself here, reading the paper, but he took care not to use his wife as a model for the girl at the piano (or at least, not to represent her -she appears in many other paintings, anyway, alone or in company).

Notice that the window is open only for us to watch; not for them.

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-The woman is looking at the sea, but probably not seeing it. The man does not even look. The link between them is so heavy, rigid, useless and rusted as the chain which ties together the wooden posts at the bottom left. This couple is getting wooden and non-alive too…; their wrists and hands folded down say to me that there is very little or no hope for them (at least for the woman). They are not even affected by the wind, blowing quite strongly, as the towels in the line show.

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-Might this one be the same couple from the previous painting (“Sea-watchers“), years later?… Anyway, their horizon is much narrower -and surely, more noisy- than ever before.

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-The same girl from “Automat” in a better mood and looking very pretty and well groomed,  talking with a friend (perhaps a colleague, and maybe just before going to work?)

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-I empathize again with that woman and her attire. In fact, the first pieces of cloth I take off when arriving to a hotel room -or to my home-, after the shoes and hat -if I wear one-, are the skirt and the panties. Keeping whatever top I’m wearing on; and even before opening my baggage… I would not sit down to read at once; I would wash my hands and probably use the toilet, but the need of feeling fresh air on my thighs and buttocks, the freedom of movement and the slight psychological (and thence, physical) arousal keeps me awake and paradoxically warm, and motivated to do things even if I’m tired as I use to be when I come back home. When I’m not bottomless when being alone or in reliable company, I tend to fade a bit out and to become depressed. I’m weird… 🙂

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-The book, the dressing table, the unopened suitcases, the posture of that girl, make me feel -again- inside the painting… I’m skinnier, blonde, my hair is quite shorter and I exist ninety years later, but I identify anyway with her introspection, secret needs and shortcomings, and with all that loneliness around.

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-One of Hopper’s first (and most upsetting) paintings… What happens to that girl?  What has ocurred to her?…

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-I wish I could live in such rooms “on” the sea…

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-My village’s beach looked quite like this one during Easter season, when I was a child. Women there did not wore hats then, however (at least not all of them)

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-This cove looks very much like Sa Riera in Palafrugell, Empordà, Catalunya)

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