Edward Hopper

Yo what up, welcome back to another episode where I talk a lot. Well, you guessed it, I'm currently under the influence. The influence of other artists' bodies of work and a little bit of crystal meth. I think as a photographer finding your visual style is important because it can set your work apart and probably the best way to do that is just to practice a lot. But if you're down for a more studious approach, you can just blatantly rip off someone's style by understanding why it exists in the first place and how it makes you feel when you consume it. For a lot of my photography, I studied a lot of favorite artists and tried to imitate and expand upon certain things that I liked in their work. A quick example of what I mean is that this very YouTube channel itself ripped the style from a lot of other awesome creators who helped pave the way for this ever-growing community. Some examples of creator influence that seeped into my videos would be Negative Feedback, Matt Day, and of course Alien vs Predator 2. In terms of my photographic work, the biggest inspiration ever for me is the painter Edward Hopper. Whenever I look at any of his works, I feel something every time, and if you're like me, feeling any emotion is rare. The feeling I get is something I strive to emulate in my own work. When I see an Edward Hopper painting or sketch, I feel like I'm peering in on a world where there's nobody left except the people in the frame. Sort of an abstract loneliness. Everything feels abandoned yet preserved. Though that may just be me projecting my own inner dialogue onto the work. Hey, art is subjective after all. You may look at the same painting and think, huh, that's an old painting. When I first saw Edward Hopper's most famous work, Nighthawks, I knew I was onto something. I mean, how sick would this look if it was shot on Cinestell 800T? From that point, I started studying everything I could about Hopper's work, but from a photography sense. For example, if his paintings were photographs, what does he expose for? How does he frame his compositions? And more importantly, what does he put in his compositions? On a more fundamental level, I noticed about 100 things about Hopper's style, besides the fact that he liked painting gas stations, which I enjoy photographing. Perhaps Edward Hopper and I would have been homies. The first thing I notice in his work is the lighting. Lighting is a key factor in any of his paintings, and I personally think this alone is what creates the mood of any body of work. The lighting is always at an angle, and in terms of tone, it's very early morning or evening light colored. However, Hopper's night scenes also offer something to dissect. In most cases, the lighting only comes from one source, which creates this sense of isolation and encompassing darkness around the subject. Another thing I ripped from Hopper's work is that a lot of his paintings are somewhat pedestrian in nature. I mean, this painting here is literally called Sun in an Empty Room. He's not painting anything crazy, like a medieval knight fighting a two-headed dragon with a chainsaw. Although, let's be honest, he probably would have nailed that. Although, it would stand apart from the rest of his collection. He's just painting normal people in normal places, but combined with the composition and lighting, as well as Hopper's secret 11 herbs and spices, they become extraordinary. I think this is the key to what I want to produce in my own work. I want to take ordinary scenes and make them beautiful and make the audience want to jump in and be a part of them. Here's a painting entitled Adam's House. Who the f*** Adam is, or thinks he is? I don't know. But look at that lighting. It's too good. It always seems like it's the same perfect angle away from the hypothetical camera. We got blue atmospheric hills here in the background too, but otherwise there isn't anything special going on in this composition. It's just a neighborhood draped in evening light. Yet somehow, everything combined just makes me personally want to exist nowhere else but in this painting. Mainly because time stands still in paintings, while in reality it marches on until we wither away and become dust. But hey, that troublingly deep psychological burden is for my therapist to bear, not you. Here's another painting entitled Talbot's House. This guy really seemed to like painting houses. I'd like to think Hopper just randomly showed up outside these people's houses and started furiously master painting. Additionally, I noticed with a lot of Hopper's black and white work, there is a lot of contrast in comparison to the color work, which is a little more tame. Admittedly, I've tried to adopt this in my own work, mostly because I think black and white film looks really good with a lot of contrast. Hopper really seemed to like painting lighthouses a lot as well. This painting is called Lighthouse Hill, and oh my sweet Baxter, that lighting is too good to be true. So let's move on. Okay, awesome. A lot of nude drawings in here. Last but not least, let us consider the colors of Hopper's work. Here's a scene from the movie Jaws, which Hopper painted in 1939, entitled Groundswell. The painting follows the most basic rule of badassery in color theory. Complementary colors. The sky and water are both blue, while the subjects of the image have tan skin and the boat has accents of orange wood. Orange and blue are two colors that go together quite well, like marinating a $500 steak with Capri Sun. In fact, orange and blue complement each other so well that many modern day movies have adopted this look, but that's a different topic for a different time. Let's take a look at another not so obvious example. This painting is entitled Second Story Sunlight, and it kind of looks like maybe it could have been shot on Fuji Pro 400H. The overall color temperature on this painting is on the cool side, with little accents of warmth throughout. I would say Hopper's intention with color isn't to slap you in the face or ass with it, but instead make it look natural and have a simplistic yet realistic beauty. Part of the reason that I shoot film is because a lot of stocks, like the living meme Portra 400, contain a sort of natural vibrance that doesn't hit you over the head with saturation. I'm in no way trying to knock digital photography, but one of my main issues is that with a digital sensor, the images come in a bit too sterile. Something about the physicality of film kind of, to me, makes it seem like I'm peering into a memory, and in some crazy way that makes no sense at all. I feel like that somehow gets me closer to the feel of Edward Hopper's work. Something else I've been trying to improve on in my own work is framing. We don't have to look very hard to find good examples of Hopper's use of framing. In fact, if we look at Nighthawks for the billionth time, we can clearly see the subjects of the painting are framed through a glass window. Hopper's painting Office in a Small City is the same deal, but flopped. New York Office and Cape Cod Morning also exhibit Hopper's love for watching people through windows. Wait. But what can we use besides windows? Well, Hopper literally uses the frames of buildings to frame his subjects too. Like this painting titled High Noon, where the subject is in the door frame. Or Summer Evening, where the subjects are boxed in by the porch frame. I mean, isn't this ---- just so gangsta? With this shot in the desert, I attempted to frame the mailbox within the outline of the foreground building, and I think it's one of my favorites. So thank you, Edward Hopper. So that's pretty much it. I have been on a deep dive on Hopper's work over the past couple of years, which is frankly pretty easy because I have no personal goals in life, and I actually quite enjoy staying inside instead of going outside to talk to people. This video exists to open up a dialogue about who turns you on creatively, because I think it's important for any artist anywhere to have some sort of inspiration. It can be the thing that yanks you out of a creative block, or takes your work to the next level. If there are any other artists out there that you think I might dig, let me know. It doesn't have to be painters, it can be any variety of media. But otherwise, yeah, let me know whose work inspires you. You know, besides obviously Alien vs Predator 2.