EDWARD HOPPER (1882-1967)
Hook Mountain (210 m - 689 ft)
United States of America
In Hook Mountain, Nyack, 1899, watercolor, Whitney Museum, NYC
The mountain
Hook Mountain (210m - 689 ft) is a summit overlooking Rockland Lake and the Hudson River, a central feature of the Hook mountain State Park. Hook Mountain was known to Dutch settlers of the region as Verdrietige Hook, meaning "Tedious Point", which may have been a reference to how long the mountain remained in view while sailing past it along the Hudson River, or for the troublesome winds that sailors encountered near the point. Hook Mountain has also been known in the past as Diedrick Hook.
Like other areas of the Hudson River Palisades, the landscape now included in Hook Mountain State Park was threatened by quarrying in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. To ensure the land's protection, the property was acquired to be a part of the Palisades Interstate Park in 1911.
Portions of Hook Mountain State Park and nearby Nyack Beach State Park were designated as a National Natural Landmark in 1980 for their portion of the Palisades Sill.
Hook Mountain was designated by the New York Audubon Society as an Important Bird Area in 1997, due to its importance as a feeding area for migratory songbirds and hawks. It has been utilized annually as a hawk monitoring station since 1971. The park is currently designated as a "Bird Conservation Area" by the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation.
In May 2015, the Sisters of Our Lady of Christian Doctrine announced that they were considering allowing their 38-acre (0.15 km2) property to become a part of Hook Mountain State Park. The order's property, which is adjacent to the southern portion of the park, could be sold to The Trust for Public Land, who would then transfer the property to New York State.
Hook Mountain State Park is a 676-acre -2.74 km2 undeveloped state park located in Rockland County, New York. The park includes a portion of the Hudson River Palisades on the western shore of the Hudson River, and is part of the Palisades Interstate Park system. Hook Mountain State Park is functionally part of a continuous complex of parks that also includes Rockland Lake State Park, Nyack Beach State Park, and Haverstraw Beach State Park.
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The painter
Edward Hopper was a American realist painter and printmaker.
Edward Hopper was a American realist painter and printmaker.
Conservative in politics and social matters (Hopper asserted for example that "artists' lives should be written by people very close to them"), he accepted things as they were and displayed a lack of idealism. Cultured and sophisticated, he was well-read, and many of his paintings show figures reading. He was generally good company and unperturbed by silences, though sometimes taciturn, grumpy, or detached. He was always serious about his art and the art of others, and when asked would return frank opinions.
Hopper's most systematic declaration of his philosophy as an artist was given in a handwritten note, entitled "Statement", submitted in 1953 to the journal, Reality:
"Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist, and this inner life will result in his personal vision of the world. No amount of skillful invention can replace the essential element of imagination. One of the weaknesses of much abstract painting is the attempt to substitute the inventions of the human intellect for a private imaginative conception.
The inner life of a human being is a vast and varied realm and does not concern itself alone with stimulating arrangements of color, form and design.
The term life used in art is something not to be held in contempt, for it implies all of existence and the province of art is to react to it and not to shun it.
Painting will have to deal more fully and less obliquely with life and nature's phenomena before it can again become great."
Though Hopper claimed that he didn't consciously embed psychological meaning in his paintings, he was deeply interested in Freud and the power of the subconscious mind. He wrote in 1939: "So much of every art is an expression of the subconscious that it seems to me most of all the important qualities are put there unconsciously, and little of importance by the conscious intellect."
Hopper was stoic and fatalistic—a quiet introverted man with a gentle sense of humor and a frank manner. Hopper was someone drawn to an emblematic, anti-narrative symbolism, who "painted short isolated moments of configuration, saturated with suggestion". His silent spaces and uneasy encounters "touch us where we are most vulnerable", and have "a suggestion of melancholy, that melancholy being enacted". His sense of color revealed him as a pure painter as he "turned the Puritan into the purist, in his quiet canvasses where blemishes and blessings balance". According to critic Lloyd Goodrich, he was "an eminently native painter, who more than any other was getting more of the quality of America into his canvases".
Hopper derived his subject matter from two primary sources: one, the common features of American life (gas stations, motels, restaurants, theaters, railroads, and street scenes) and its inhabitants; and two, seascapes and rural landscapes, a few (2 or 3, not much) mountains landscape. Regarding his style, Hopper defined himself as "an amalgam of many races" and not a member of any school, particularly the "Ashcan School". Once Hopper achieved his mature style, his art remained consistent and self-contained, in spite of the numerous art trends that came and went during his long career.
Hopper's seascapes fall into three main groups: pure landscapes of rocks, sea, and beach grass; lighthouses and farmhouses; and sailboats. Sometimes he combined these elements.
Urban architecture and cityscapes also were major subjects for Hopper. He was fascinated with the American urban scene, "our native architecture with its hideous beauty, its fantastic roofs, pseudo-gothic, French Mansard, Colonial, mongrel or what not, with eye-searing color or delicate harmonies of faded paint, shouldering one another along interminable streets that taper off into swamps or dump heaps."
References
- Edward Hopper Wikipedia Page 