ART & INSPIRATION

I Was Invited to Teach a Workshop at Edward Hopper House — I Jumped at the Chance

Visiting the birthplace of my favorite artist

Early Sunday Morning, by Edward Hopper — photo courtesy of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchased, with funds from Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney

I discovered Edward Hopper when I was about eight years old in the pages of an old magazine. My parents always had some old magazines laying around the house, I used to look through them for interesting things to draw or cut out the pictures to use in collages or crafts.

That day, I came upon a photo of a painting titled Early Sunday Morning by Edward Hopper. I could not stop looking at it, it looked so real, and beyond that, it looked so much like the scenes I would walk past everyday on my way to school. The factories, the barber shops, luncheonettes, all of them well past their prime, but visually interesting nonetheless.

I had no idea who Edward Hopper was, I was just a child who loved to draw and paint more than anything else, little did I know that I had probably been to many of the places he painted in New York and New Jersey.

I remember thinking to myself that Hopper painted these places the way they actually looked to me. The sunlight on the terra cotta toned bricks, forest green newel posts and railings on the apartment houses, dusty shop windows, Mansard roofs, all of the architecture of the…