My friends, who know how neurotically protective I am about books, will appreciate how much I love Edward Hopper's painting "Pennsylvania Coal Town," when I tell you that I have a copy of this, clipped from a book, framed on the wall of my office. I wanted it so much that when I found a Hopper book on the remainder rack, I bought two copies so that I could cut the picture from one and still have a complete copy in the other. (Did I throw out the damaged copy of the book? Of course I didn't. It's on my shelf,next to the good copy!)
I see things in this painting, level under level.
First, of course, the painting is a charming little vignette of Americana. It's the story of a bald old fellow living in a frame house in a coal town in Pennsylvania, fifty years ago. He's raking the lawn between his house and the neighbors' on a sunny autumn afternoon, and he's taking a little break to catch some sunlight. The painting doesn't need to be one inch deeper than that to be valuable to me. I like the setting, I like the little story and I like the colors. I'd put it on my wall just for that.
But below that, it's a painting about sunlight on a wall. Hopper was quoted somewhere (I can't look up the reference just now) about just wanting to paint sunlight on a wall, and later in life he did just that, in paintings such as "Sun in an Empty Room" (1963). I can't paint or draw, but I have always been captivated by the simple mystery of sunlight on walls. Artists make an important emotional connection with you when you realize that someone else is in interested in the same things you thought no one else saw but you.
I could talk about this, of course. It's interesting that light travels ninety-three million miles from the sun to the earth. It's interesting that it takes six minutes — I could say that I'm seeing the sun the way it was six minutes ago, or I could get tongue-tangled trying to use my tenuous grasp of Einsteinian physics to explain that it really doesn't make sense to assume there's a special "now" moment shared by both us and the sun. It's interesting that light is so tiny and precise that if you examined the wall with a magnifying glass, you'd see little hills and valleys, each with their own precise shadow. If you picked one of them to view with a microscope, you'd see little hills and valleys at that level, each with a precise shadow, and if you used an electron microscope there would still be those little precise shadows.
But the real fascination of sunlight on a wall is that it's completely below the level of words for me. It's not a philosophy, it's not an idea, it's just the … the thing that it's interesting that the sunlight lays on one surface but not on another.
Let me go one more level down, and here I suspect I've left Edward Hopper quite behind. For me, this painting is about the sudden joy of mystical union that sometimes strikes you during the day. Now, the fellow in the painting is not having a religious experience, he's taking a breather from raking the lawn and quite possibly wondering if there's any cold beer in the icebox. But it's also true that he's caught in a still moment, not moving, facing the warm flood of sunlight, static and ecstatic between two walls of two houses. He's connected to the sun, to the lawn, to his rake, and for that matter to Pennsylvania. In moments like that, you think "Huh!". It's not verbal, but it's what the good life is about.
I have a feeling this essay isn't adding up to much. That's the problem with trying to write about a painting — as the conventional wisdom says, if the artist could have explained what he meant in words, he wouldn't have to paint the painting.
So let me conclude by saying that this is a good painting and I enjoy looking at my clipped-out reproduction of it. You might, too.
