Quotes About Edward Hopper

#1. America, the Idea of: We yearned for its beer and jazz, its smoke-filled nightclubs, its Edward Hopper bars, the melancholy of rainy Manhattan Gershwin nights ... the America we yearned for has gone. Did it ever exist?

Michael Bywater

#2. What we hope for from the artist is help in discovering the significance of a place. In this sense we would choose in most respects for thirty minutes with Edward Hopper's painting Sunday Morning to thirty minutes on the street that was his subject; with Hopper's vision we see more.

Robert Adams

#3. I always say Philadelphia, Pennsylvania is my biggest influence. But for painters, I like many, many painters, but I love Francis Bacon the most, and Edward Hopper.

David Lynch

#4. Maine likes to call itself 'America's Vacationland.' For many artists, though, it's the office. Since the 19th century, painters from all over the country - including Edward Hopper, Alex Katz, John Marin, Fairfield Porter, Neil Welliver and Andrew Wyeth - have spent large chunks of time there.

Terry Teachout

#5. Butte was once a grand city. To me, that city is like one big stage for Edward Hopper. You could put your camera anywhere, and you felt you were looking at his paintings.

Wim Wenders

#6. There is a sort of elation about sunlight on the upper part of a house.

Edward Hopper

#7. The only real influence I've ever had is myself.

Edward Hopper

#8. I find linseed oil and white lead the most satisfactory mediums.

Edward Hopper

#9. No amount of skillful invention can replace the essential element of imagination.

Edward Hopper

#10. I use a retouching varnish which is made in France, Libert, and that's all the varnish I use.

Edward Hopper

#11. Yes, linseed oil. I used to use poppy oil, but I have heard that poppy oil is given to cracking pigment too, so I use it no longer.

Edward Hopper

#12. Well, I have a very simple method of painting.

Edward Hopper

#13. Well, 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.

Edward Hopper

#14. I have tried to present my sensations in what is the most congenial and impressive form possible to me.

Edward Hopper

#15. The only quality that endures in art is a personal vision of the world. Methods are transient: personality is enduring.

Edward Hopper

#16. So much of every art is an expression of the subconscious that it seems to me most of all the important qualities are put there unconsciously, and little of importance by the conscious intellect. But these are things for the psychologist to untangle.

Edward Hopper

#17. So many people say painting is fun. I don't find it fun at all. It's hard work for me.

Edward Hopper

#18. Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist, and this inner life will result in his personal vision of the world.

Edward Hopper

#19. Painting will have to deal more fully and less obliquely with life and nature's phenomena before it can again become great.

Edward Hopper

#20. What I wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house.

Edward Hopper

#21. I trust Winsor and Newton and I paint directly upon it.

Edward Hopper

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

Edward Hopper

#23. If you could say it in words, there would be no reason to paint.

Edward Hopper

#24. If the picture needs varnishing later, I allow a restorer to do that, if there's any restoring necessary.

Edward Hopper

#25. There will be, I think, an attempt to grasp again the surprise and accidents of nature and a more intimate and sympathetic study of its moods, together with a renewed wonder and humility on the part of such as are still capable of these basic reactions.

Edward Hopper

#26. It's to paint directly on the canvas without any funny business, as it were, and I use almost pure turpentine to start with, adding oil as I go along until the medium becomes pure oil. I use as little oil as I can possibly help, and that's my method.

Edward Hopper

#27. The question of the value of nationality in art is perhaps unsolvable.

Edward Hopper

#28. I find in working always the disturbing intrusion of elements not a part of my most interested vision, and the inevitable obliteration and replacement of this vision by the work itself as it proceeds.

Edward Hopper

#29. More of me comes out when I improvise.

Edward Hopper

#30. To me the most important thing is the sense of going on. You know how beautiful things are when you're traveling.

Edward Hopper

#31. I think that zinc white has a property of scaling and cracking.

Edward Hopper

#32. I guess I'm not very human. All I really want to do is paint light on the side of a house.

Edward Hopper

#33. 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

#34. I believe that the great painters with their intellect as master have attempted to force this unwilling medium of paint and canvas into a record of their emotions.

Edward Hopper

#35. Hopper's paintings are full of women like her; women who appear to be in the grips of a loneliness that has to do with gender and unattainable standards of appearance, and that gets increasingly toxic and strangulating with age.

Olivia Laing

#36. 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

#37. In its most limited sense, modern, art would seem to concern itself only with the technical innovations of the period.

Edward Hopper

#38. When I don't feel in the mood for painting I go to the movies for a week or more. I go on a regular movie binge!

Edward Hopper

#39. The trend in some of the contemporary movements in art, but by no means all, seems to deny this ideal and to me appears to lead to a purely decorative conception of painting.

Edward Hopper

#40. If I had the energy, I would have done it all over the county.

Edward Hopper

#41. My aim in painting has always been the most exact transcription possible of my most intimate impression of nature.

Edward Hopper

#42. 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

#43. I once got a little camera to use for details of architecture and so forth but the photo was always so different from the perspective the eye gives, I gave it up.

Edward Hopper