Rooms by the Sea, Edward Hopper, oil on canvas, 1951
Although I have a great affection for Edward Hopper, he is far from being an artist who has ever cast a spell over me.
I think any painter, writer, musician, architect, what-have-you, should be able to articulate the early influences whom previous artists have had over them. Who has lit the rapture in inside them and helped shape their formation into the solid craft of their choosing?
Although I saw his pictures when I was a child they didn't speak to me the way that many others did. To be fair, I was pretty fascinated with most paintings when I was as a young kid, as I didn't have any way to discern them as either 'liable or not'.
My father had covered his bathroom walls with copies of Masaccio, Piero della Francesca, Ghirlandaio, Botticelli, and I forget whom else. They were lifted from the many books on Italian Art which he collected. For sure, he had a thing about Italian Painting, but he really had a thing about Italy, in all its forms. He devoured everything Italian.
My father, being a Catholic child, and brought up in a somewhat strict tradition in Providence, Rhode Island of the 1920's wanted nothing more than to escape it all, which he did when he joined naval officer training for World War Two.
But from what I understood, he excelled in Latin, so that certain languages came easy for him. He learned enough Italian to get around, some French too and he taught me an invaluable lesson when we were in Florence in 1956 when I was four. While walking around town, he would randomly stop people in the streets and in shops to ask directions that invariably led to innocuous questions that initiated conversation. This was an Italy, not far from the war, where people were just so happy to be out in the prospect of a sunnier future themselves and their families. America had helped to save them from a Fascistic chaos after all, and so the attention of a charismatic American with floppy colourful clothes who posed an incessant stream of questions about their lives, about the war, about art, was extremely seductive. He had a kind, friendly manner that drew people into him easily so consequently everything about him was an invitation to be equally open and friendly. He stopped the Carabinieri often for directions and once got us both a ride on a giant Moto Guzzi, me scrunched in between him and my father in the middle of Florence. The priests in their long black robes were always good for a 'stop and chat' as Larry David, of Seinfeld fame calls it. Taking me by the hand after each of these encounters he would quietly explaim that he had just had an Italian Lesson. Later on, when I went to live France years later, I employed the same tactics and it worked just as well.
Could he have been an artist? Should have been a painter? Who knows? But he loved it and he painted periodically. It's hard to become a painter unless it's almost full time I think from experience.
He painted the picture below back in the 1960's, in Providence, Rhode Island, where he regularly returned to visit his sister, my aunt Maddie. His father had emigrated in the late 19th century from Ireland as a boy of fifteen. He was the eldest of eight or nine children who arrived by boat. It was a tough time.
I think he must have been influenced by Edward Hopper to make such an picture like this. It has a decidedly 'cool' Northern Light to it, very New England, I think. It's an efficient picture, which is to say that it visually works well, where everything is in the right place. I have never really warmed up to it despite the fact that it was painted by my father. This is strange because I have so little left of his and I've always felt a little guilty about this. And yet, it has beautiful parts in it, nice abstract resolutions, especially in the foreground, both on the right and left sides.
Thomas A Coffey, Smith Street, Providence Rhode Island, circa 1960, oil on canvas, 60 X 50 cm
The Edward Hopper painting (top), is a curious image unlike anything I've ever seen of his. At times his pictures possessed a solid kind chunk of Americana; lighthouses, New England farmlands, roof tops, American streets of large empty-looking homes. These are not pictures by Monet or Pissarro, and peopled with figures hurrying along streets or holding their hats and bracing the wind. No, Hopper's paintings are devoid of humanity in a weird way, almost as if after a plague had removed everyone.
But his famous urban pictures are those inversely peopled with solitary lives. The 'Night Hawk' the corner cafe at night with a few lone figures in it. There are lots of women too, alone, looking out windows from their beds or cafes sitting in silence like mannequins. He tapped into the quiet, dark, and restless soul of America at about the same time as did also many American writers like Sinclair Lewis, Henry Miller, John Steinbeck, Richard Wright.
His dystopian imagination led him to paint these bleak American pictures but not without a sense of humour. This painting (top) is unusually Surrealist in spirit, and I like it for that. A door opens up on the sea outside with no explanation.
I also love the colours and the way it's been constructed, its strong natural light pours into an interior like it's a still-life. It's a hard Northern white light that gives it the feel of a film set. It's a strange and beguiling picture, one I would easily live with here in my small home. It makes me think of what the architect Louis Kahn once said about Light. "A room doesn't know itself until light enters it."
Here, below, is another kind of light, one from the Southern Hemisphere. There is little reference except a sea and a sky at dusk.
Evening Prayer, Brunswick Heads, 21 January 2025, oil on canvas board 30 X 25 cm
