Edward Hopper quotes - page 3

Edward Hopper was an American realist painter and printmaker, renowned for his evocative depictions of modern American life. His works often capture themes of solitude, urban landscapes, and the quiet moments of everyday existence. He is celebrated for his unique ability to convey mood and atmosphere through light and composition. Here are 72 of his quotes:

Recognition does not mean so much, you never get it when you need it.

Edward Hopper

Though I studied with Robert Henri, I was never a member of the Ash-Can School. You see, it had a sociological trend which didn't interest me. [Hopper then proceeded to inform Kuh that his work contained no social content whatsoever! ].

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

I am interested primarily in the vast field of experience and sensation which neither literature nor a purely plastic art deals with.

Edward Hopper

The domination of France in the plastic arts has been almost complete for the last thirty years or more in this country [America]. If an apprenticeship to a master has been necessary, I think we have served it. Any further relation of such a character can only mean humiliation to us. After all, we are not French and never can be, and any attempt to be so is to deny our inheritance and to try to impose upon ourselves a character that can be nothing but a veneer upon the surface.

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

Sloan [American colleague artist who started his art by making etchings, c. 1920] not having been abroad [in contrary to Hopper himself], has seen these things with a truer and fresher eye than most... The hard early training has given to Sloan a facility and a power of invention that the pure painter seldom achieves.

Edward Hopper

Maybe I am not very human - what I wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house.

Edward Hopper

In general it can be said that a nation's art is greatest when it most reflects the character of its people.

Edward Hopper

Paris is a very graceful and beautiful city, almost too formal and sweet to the taste after the raw disorder of New York. Everything seems to have been planned with the purpose of forming a most harmonious whole, which certainly has been done.. .Every street here is alive with all sorts of conditions of people, priests, nuns, students, and always the little soldiers with wide red pants.

Edward Hopper

The people here in fact seem to live in the streets, which are alive from morning until night, not as they are in New York with that never-ending determination for the 'long-green', but with a pleasure-loving crowd that doesn't care what it does or where it goes, so that it has a good time.

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

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

The man's the work. Something does not come out of nothing.

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

I could just go a few steps [from the house where he stayed in Paris in 1906- 1907] and I'd see the Louvre across the river. From the corner of the Rue de Bac and Lille (sic) you could see Sacré-Coeur. It hung like a great vision in the air above the city.

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

It's (the lack of communication between the people in his paintings, ed.) probably a reflection of my own, if I may say, loneliness. I don't know. It could be the whole human condition.

Edward Hopper

At Gloucester [village at the sea where Hopper with his wife Jo had married and stayed during the summer of 1924] when everyone else would be painting ships and the waterfront I'd just go around looking at houses (watercolor: 'Haskell's house', 1924). It is a solid looking town. The roofs are very bold, the cornices bolder. The dormers cast very positive shadows. The sea captain influence I guess – the boldness of ships.

Edward Hopper