Landscapes So, So Familiar

August 05, 2007

Filed in: The Home Front

Just back from finally seeing Edward Hopper at the MFA. Stunning, brilliant, color-soaked, flat. I love Hopper. My mom loves Hopper. She has two Hopper prints hanging in her otherwise un-art-heavy house, including the one (as she reminded us at lunch after the exhibit) she cut out of a magazine and slapped into a frame. My kind of accessible art.

After awhile, you get sick of his busty hippy slightly sour sexy-heavy women. Except for the girl in Chop Suey, who is sweet perfection, and maybe the woman in the Automat, all the other women seem to be rather wearily playing the part of universal stand-in for dames everywhere.

Also, the guy was clearly a perv. But he was a perv who painted New England light better than nearly anybody, so we forgive him his obsession with the fat female backside. Walking through the exhibit, over and over I had the sensation of, “I know this. I know this.” Gloucester. The outer Cape. Maine. I know all of those places, some quite literally. I know Rt. 6 in Eastham. Twice a week I walk Pip by the neighborhoods Hopper painted in Gloucester.

But mostly what I know is the light. You can’t know this when you’re 20, maybe not even 30. It takes a long time for the light of a place to really sink into your bones, into your unconsciousness, so you can see it before you read the little placards, see it from across a gallery--this was early morning. That was late afternoon. This was autumn. That was late summer.

Today was just plain summer, not (yet) late. High 70s, dry as a bone, not a streak of anything in the sky, blue blue blue. We drove home from the museum and took the dog out into the billowing breeze. Following her across the fields in calf-high grass at 4 in the afternoon, I thought, I know this.