Anna Branford

Hopper, Woodard and my fairly plebian reflections on art more generally

I think because of my recent dealings with illustrators, I’ve been reflecting lately on the fact that I’ve spent most of my life not really understanding visual art. My key question has been: would I rather look at that image than the blank wall behind it? And to be honest, I’m a bit of a minimalist at heart and am quite a fan of the odd clear surface. So, mine has not been what you’d call an exciting love affair with this ancient but also hyper-modern form of human expression…

Two people in my life who have changed this a bit are John Carroll, under whom I studied as an undergraduate and Alain de Botton, whose newest books I await just as people twenty-five years my junior await a new offering from J.K. Rowling. (That is, I stop just short of camping outside the bookshop.) These two thinkers and writers have presented art to me in a way that has given me just a glimmer of insight into how to ‘read’ it – how to use this medium to tune into aspects of life which seem somehow unsayable.

Alain de Botton sometimes writes and speaks about Edward Hopper’s work in terms of loneliness. This is Hopper’s ‘Automat’ (1927):

For Botton, this is a woman for whom something has gone wrong – whose aloneness and discomfort we feel.

The woman in ‘Morning Sun’ (1952)  too:

Alain de Botton’s writing gave me a ‘way in’ to these paintings but I have found that for me, they are not representations of loneliness. Both capture something I find almost impossible to articulate about my own much-treasured experiences of travelling alone – something like a rush of independence and freedom, a disconcerting shift into a life ungoverned by ordinary deadlines and the necessities of everyday life,  and the simultaneously dreadful and thrilling question – when I don’t have to do or think anything, what shall I do and think?

But this is all  muddy and clumsy, where Hopper has been pure and clear.

A contemporary artist whose work I have only just discovered is Scott Woodard. I mistook him, initially, for a blogger who did a bit of painting. In fact, he is probably much better understood as a painter who used to keep a blog.

This is one of his recent works, ‘The Perfect Ascent’ (2010):

For me, this image, along with lots of Woodard’s other work, captures a sensation that is linked with the solitude in Hopper’s paintings but it takes the feeling inward – somewhere near the necessary solitude of being almost asleep, or almost awake. In these transient moments too, perhaps we are quite alone and quite ungoverned. But once again, it can’t be written about with much in the way of clarity. Somehow, it takes an image like this one to capture the feeling.