Hopper Revisited

This is how it all started: "Nighthawks", Edward Hopper's famous painting of a lonely street corner diner, glowing in a dark and lonely urban scene was reproduced and printed on cheesy t-shirts in a gift shop at the Chicago Art Institute. I do not claim to know much about art. Like most, all I know is what I like. I pushed the wire hangers back until I found my size and wore it on the plane home to Utah. Proust wrote that art should explain us to ourselves. Subconsciously a painting, a piece of music or sculpture will pull us near and in a hushed tone say, 'I know,...right?' Even on a piece of pre-shrunk cotton, some secret exciting and half painful knowledge inside was scratched before I knew anything about what the people in his paintings represented.
To understand some of his paintings is to understand that lonely feeling that rises when you are surrounded by so many people that any form of human interaction and intimacy that we so badly thrive on, nears an impossibility. Many of his paintings were urban scenes of people lost in transition, painted in almost a voyueristic way that makes the viewer even feel lonely for 'watching'.
The effects from the migration of the American from the land to the socially constructed and apathetic city was often the back story to the lonely and lost people in his paintings, hanging, staring as if suspended in the middle of some sort of cycle. This narrative came to me as an honest, sad, and endearing portrait of many of my own feelings. Searching the subjects of his paintings, I saw the main characters of Kerouac novels, adrift, conflicted, full of intention only lacking the affirmation regarding where to place this intention.
As I photographed a friend from Germany's wedding a few weeks ago and this intense midday light came through the windows, sliding angles of heated sunlight across solid colored carpet, I just felt like I was in a Hopper painting. I felt like a similar feeling was there as well, maybe just in a less depressing way. If you had time to waste you could analyze the imagery in a dozen different ways. The couple-hands clasped to reinforce this "us against the world" idea, backs to the eye - that feeling of voyuerism, faces to the sun yet invisible - the unanswered question of how the subject feels, (Hopper rarely showed emotion in the faces), the wedding - a day of transition, etc. I don't think my friends were sad like some of Hopper's symbols, but my own feelings seeping through filled in the gaps between reality and this image being similar to paintings that consistently demand my attention.
Although in my mind they look like the subjects in one of his paintings, they were happy, not sad, lonely or depressed. This can be answered by two possible scenarios. 1) The photograph exposes a latent truth of feelings of being overwhelmed with possibility that existed, just not on the surface. Or, 2) Art (this feeling that educates) is not in the relationship between the subject and the remainder of elements in the medium, rather it is inside the relationship between the viewer and the entire medium. Either way, whoever is responsible for putting VanGogh's on coffee mugs and Warhol's on keychains; keep it up. There is plenty of art out there waiting to pull us close and give us a break by shedding light on our secret conflicts, cares and desires.