Edward HOPPER and Gregory CREWDSON - Scenes of Life

Morning Sun, Edward Hopper, 1952

I am convinced that this exercise goes far beyond my knowledge of these artists and my abilities to read them technically. It may be that I can at least put into words what I feel when I look at their works. 

I discovered the work of the painter Edward Hopper a few years ago - I fell in love - and on my last birthday I was lucky enough to be given Taschen's book on him. Gregory Crewdson (photographer) was introduced to me at a good friend's birthday dinner table a few months ago, in the midst of many simultaneous conversations in which, as a good granddaughter of my grandmother, I kept dropping my ear. I don't consider myself to have extraordinary memorizing qualities, but this name, a disciple of Hopper, they said, was kept, and looking for it was the first thing I did the next day when I woke up, half crushed from the night before. 

Gregory Crewdson (1962) was born in New York five years before Edward Hopper (1882-1967) died, in the same city. They may have crossed paths, but they certainly did not know each other. Both studied art; one painted the same woman, his own, also a painter, almost all his life; the other surrounded himself with teams of sometimes over a hundred people who prepared the scene for the photograph. Both are very concerned with colour, framing and realism in their paintings and photographs. They both have a much richer life story than the one that goes into this paragraph, but here we should mainly bet that both were enchanted by people and by the infinite possibilities that the life of each one of them contained and contains. 

Isn't it curious that Hopper's paintings or Crewdson's photographs that tell the stories of the people who live in them, are the ones that move me the most and make me stay endless minutes just looking and imagining who they were and who they are, how they lived and live, what made and makes them happy, what worries and makes them uneasy, what they suffered or suffer from, what made and makes them continue or stay, what motivated and motivates them. And what motivated and motivates them - painter and photographer - for such generosity in standing at the feet of all of them and rehearsing all those different forms of life. 

I think there is more than one reason for this fascination of mine: they take me both to everyday, interior places (on top of that, they let me do one of the things I like most which is to look at people and into their homes); places that are lonely but not absent (I have for me that the cruelest form of abandonment is the abandonment of each one for oneself); Places that, despite their quietness, have obvious signs that life has moved there (an unmade bed, clothes on the floor while the woman gets ready to take a bath, a curtain blowing in the wind on a summer's night and the open window letting in that fresh breeze, live flowers in a vase). Places that are disturbing and, not surprisingly, not very quiet, because if they are often the interior places, even with paintings or photographs of exteriors or of people with their eyes set on an infinite that could even invoke the lost, those are the ones I feel like going to get or get to know. 

These days, both in love and obsessive, I look several times at the paintings of one and the photographs of the other and I dream that I am the one there. And, if it were, what would I be feeling? Then I go back to the walls of the house and I realise that I am not in those paintings or scene photographs and that makes me happy precisely because I am not and because I can take advantage of the scenes of this real life to listen to the follies of my inner place, sometimes quieter than others.

I rejoice to feel that I will come out of this "thing" that is not staged, if not stronger, at least less unknown to myself.