Edward Hopper Quotes

Edward Hopper reflects on artistic growth, human sensation, and the vast field of experience.

32 quotes

1. In every artist's development the germ of a later work is always found in the earlier.

2. I think a great deal of contemporary painting doesn't have that element(decaying from your original idea) in it at all.It is all cerebral invention.Inventions not conceived in the imagination at all...contemporary painting is false..it has no intimacy.

3. To me form,color and design are merely a means to an end....I am interested primarily in the vast field of experience and sensation.

4. Invention...is the essence of personality.

5. ...all the sweltering, tawdry life of the American small town, and behind all, the sad desolation of our suburban landscape.

6. I can't always agree with what critics say - it may be true; it may not be true.

7. I can't exactly describe the sensations, but they're entirely human and perhaps have nothing to do with aesthetics.

8. Whom did I meet? Nobody. I'd heard of Gertrude Stein, but I don't remember having heard of Picasso at all. I used to go to the cafes at night and sit and watch. I went to the theatre a little. Paris had no great or immediate impact on me.

9. Maybe I am slightly inhuman ... all I ever wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house.

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

11. Unconsciously, probably, I was painting the loneliness of a large city.

12. The man's the work. Something doesn't come out of nothing.

13. I am interested primarily in the vast field of experience and sensation.

14. Why I select certain subjects rather than others ,I do not exactly know,unless it is that I believe them to be the best medium for a synthesis of my inner experience.

15. Hopper is simply a bad painter, but if he were a better one, he would probably not be such a great artist.

16. For most Europeans, Edward Hopper's art confirms a preconceived image of America: Hopper's American qualities are in the scenes he chose to paint.

17. Hopper made a lot of changes - he cleaned things up.

18. Hopper's best pictures are representational only in that simplified, stripped-down, visually dissonant manner that suggests some distant memory, or a dream.... They are simple, yet mysterious; blunt, yet poetic; familiar, yet at the same time inscrutable.

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

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

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

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

23. 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.

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

25. 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.

26. The only real influence I've ever had was myself.

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

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

29. If you could say it in words there would be no reason to paint.

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

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

32. More of me comes out when I improvise.