Oh, Hoppery Day

There was a day last week, Wednesday I think it was, when I received a postcard (something of a pleasurable rarity these days) from a friend who lives in the Netherlands. He’d visited an exhibition of American Realist art in the north-eastern Dutch town of Assen, and the card was of “Morning Sun”, painted by Edward Hopper in 1952. Wonderful. I enjoy a good Hopper of a Wednesday morning. As, arguably, the greatest Realist painter of the twentieth century, Hopper has long been one of my favourite artists. Also, as someone happy in the ordinary, shabby environments of daily life, he is someone to whom I can relate. As, I suspect, can many people.

Later that day, full of Hoppery anticipation, I watched a programme, one of a series, about American art. This one was supposedly about the effects of the big city – essentially New York – upon artists living there, and especially on those who had emigrated from eastern Europe. Just my sort of thing, or so I thought. Sadly, the programme was a total disappointment, with a presenter who – despite an uncanny ability to identify the Brooklyn Bridge at close range - frequently got in the way (literally as well as figuratively) of the works he was describing. He made me feel itchy, and not in a nice way.

You can’t libel the dead, which is just as well. Hopper was described as a voyeur who rode the elevated lines of New York City so that he could look in upon ladies through upstairs windows. That’s how he got his material for the likes of “Morning Sun”, according to this presenter. My understanding – gleaned, admittedly, from books, and not from any inside source available only to clever people in the art world - is that Hopper mostly used his wife, Jo, as the model for the female subjects in his paintings. While it was made clear that Hopper was not a Peeping Tom in the normal sense, “voyeur” is a word with a specific meaning. Unfortunate, to say the least.

Next, Hopper was labelled a curmudgeon, not – one might have imagined - an essential fact in a high speed tour of the man’s role in art history. Then there was all the usual tired old guff about “Nighthawks”, loneliness and alienation in the big city, the psychological spaces between people, and so on. Yawn. Nothing about the sheer beauty of the paintings, the atmospheres, their inspiration, the celebration of place, the lights and weathers and seasons and times of day. Just the old urban alienation shtick. Voyeurism, curmudgeon, alienation. Tick. Job done.  And then rapidly off topic to something that the presenter evidently liked; some celebrated daubs by émigrés with long and crunchy birth names whose pernickety enunciation he  repeatedly demonstrated. Not really what you want in a programme with the potential to educate and to appetise. Hopper-maligned, I hopped off to bed, hopping mad.

Inevitably, as a Realist, as a technically competent artist, whose works are pleasant to look at and easy to understand, and as someone with wide appeal (as witnessed by calendar sales, year after year) Hopper is not a significant focus of interest for the Art Establishment. He’s not likely to impress the polysyllabically enabled critics and curators who – together with the works they so admire - were so effectively destroyed by the superb Jonathan Meades, in a recent programme on “Jargon”.

As usual, Meades was inventive, scathing, hilarious, hugely intelligent, hyper-articulate, rivetting, making full use of television as a medium upon which can be presented simultaneously an imaginative and knowledgeable presenter able to act and to mimic, accompanied by pertinent background images, text, and music. Proper multimedia. One’s only criticism of Meades is that he provides so much that it’s hard to take it all in. This single programme about the present day abuse of language could and should be expanded into a whole series, covering, for example, corporate life, television reporters, sports, politics, academia, the internet, and the diversity and equality industries. Meades makes one painfully aware – sometimes from laughing too much - of just how moronic most television, and most of modern life, actually is.

A modern life which would have been the despair of Edward Hopper. Famously, the artist stated that his ambition was to paint the sunlight on the side of a house. What he also painted, although I don’t think he ever said as much, explicitly, was silence. While loneliness and alienation are not desirable states, aloneness, solitariness, and quiet can be. Silence is what, so often, we lack.

 
In the overcrowded cities of our overpopulated land it’s hard to find somewhere uncontaminated not so much by the banalities of excessive commentary and advice on how we’re supposed to think but by hideous noise; “attention, this vehicle is reversing”, car alarms, someone jabbering highly important nonsense into a phone, some discordant hate-filled noise blaring from a portable gadget or car-bound device. The curse of electronics and its spin-offs. And the visual insults. Perfect views ruined by big fat ugly parked cars, skips, scaffolding, graffiti, phone masts, wind farms, ill-placed signs, delivery vans, yes, always a bloody white van comes tearing round the corner the moment you reach for your camera. 

Oh, for an empty street, silent but for perhaps an ambient hum of city energy, the miaouw of a streetwise moggie, the confident clatter of a distant train, a plaintive horn on a riverboat, even the occasional echo of a school playground – streets away - off a vast blind wall … Sunshine and silence. Something to paint. Oh, Hoppery Day.

Making it up as you go along

It was amusing to see the Fat Controller on the news this week, launching the microminimally speeded up East Midlandzzz Trainzzz services to London, with four whole minutes shaved off some journey times between Derby and London, and an entire minute saved between Leicester and the capital. He failed to mention that, in the new timetable, some of the services from Nottingham by this most unattractive of train operators are actually taking longer.

When asked whether this thrilling, paradigm-shifting, quantum-leaping acceleration that so underwhelmed interviewed potential passengers didn’t obviate the need for HS2, he countered that more freight was travelling by rail, that we needed more capacity and that, er, more people were travelling. So, three absolutely compelling reasons then. Or maybe two (but what’s mere numbers to politicians, eh ? It’s always being right that counts). Travelling into Birmingham last weekend I couldn’t but help notice the cleared site adjacent to the Curzon Street relic that will form the projected HS2 terminus in the Second City, and I also observed how far it was from New Street and from most of the city centre.

Birmingham, as both a major city and a national transport hub, needs a radical improvement to its rail services, but neither HS2 nor the current redevelopment of New Street Station are the answer. Something with twice (or some multiple, I’m sure the experts would know) the capacity of New Street, incorporating HS2, is needed; perhaps, somehow, a New Street “deep” station, to use the terminology of the Berlin Haupbahnhof. It would cost a vast amount of money and cause huge disruption, but other countries – the Netherlands, for instance – are tackling similar problems in an imaginative way. If only the inspiration lying behind the splendid new Library of Birmingham could be redirected towards relieving the desperate congestion of the existing rail facilities.

More positively, I’ve now completed my promised painting, and though it hasn’t photographed very well, here it is.

It’s a composite, located in a semi-fictional setting in the vicinity of Westbourne Park and Kensal Town in west London, between the Paddington Canal and the Western Region main line, and it has the provisional title, with obvious debts to Algernon Newton and Edward Hopper, of “Terrace by the canal”. Hope you like it.

 © R. Abbott 2013

Essay on Algernon Newton and other diversions

One can so easily disengage from the unnatural habit of blogging, and so it has been these last few weeks. Apologies to anyone who has missed my rantings; sadly, HS2 hasn’t been abandoned – yet. Travel has been one excuse for my inactivity, lack of inspiration the most honest one, a slow stage in the production of “Tourist In Your Own Town” another. However, things are on the move again.

Since the creative urge will out anyway, in the absence of significant activity on “Tourist” I’ve been letting the muse follow her own channels. She’s been trickling out in several media (that’s enough purple pompous pretentiousness, thank you.-  Ed). Sorry. Musically, I’ve been attending to The Catford Tendency, playing around with some explosive little tunes which, in their raw state, are enjoying the working title of “The Dysfunctionals”. Tunes inspired by some people I know quite well. Anger, despair, other negative emotions. No, you don’t know who you are, do you, you don’t read blogs.

And I’m painting again. Though I’ve never consciously copied anyone, given my appetite for visions of urban grot and aesthetic shabbiness (I’m watching you – Ed), comparisons with the pet themes of Edward Hopper and Algernon Newton are probably inevitable. Especially as I like oblique sunlight and deserted city scenes, early morning stillness and such. Hopper of course is regular fare for calendar producers and TV psychologists steeped in the imagery of metropolitan alienation; Newton is much less well known, probably because he’s British but without the need to boast or to shock as an alternative to  possessing talent. To be honest, much of Newton’s output is naff, it’s flat and lifeless, amateurish and mediocre, and with some of his later works one is left wondering “why ?” Nevertheless, at his best - and that isn’t often - he’s gorgeous.

Relatively little has been written about Algernon Newton, and therefore I decided to indulge myself by writing a little essay about him, a brief biography, and some highly subjective comments on some of his paintings. Anyone who would like a free copy of the essay is welcome, although the accompanying illustrations are not copyright cleared. But it will give you a potted account and some weblinks, if you’re interested.

Rather like Hopper and comments about alienation and loneliness in the big city, Newton routinely attracts remarks about his works portraying menace and ominous foreboding, sometimes regarded as psychological portents of World War Two, or as delayed side effects of his First World War experiences. There’s quite a consensus, apparently, but I’m not sure about this; it seems to me that city scenes can be empty, quiet and still, without necessarily portraying anything sinister. That would be the case as regards my own paintings. Thundery skies can just be thundery skies. Visual or topographical pleasure may need no further analysis.

The quiet city in question is (mostly) London between the wars. Newton became known as the “Regent’s Canaletto”, a neat pun acknowledging his admiration of the Italian maestro plus his frequent choice of the Regent’s Canal for subject matter – mostly in shabby locations in Paddington and Camden Town. Those sort of places are among my favourites too. His very best painting, however,  one that fills me with unfulfillable yearnings, is of Camberwell, an idyllic canal scene now long since obliterated by the banalities of Burgess Park, a location dead and buried along with the age and the values it represented.

Thus stimulated by my brief study of Algernon Newton I have returned to one of my favourite artistic locations, the area of west London close to Trellick Tower, the former Great Western main line and the Grand Union Canal known formally as Kensal Town, a broken off outpost of humanity that at one time might have declared allegiance to Paddington or North Kensington. From the early sixties onwards this area was seen to good and proper by planners, social engineers, architects, you know the sort, the same ilk as the begetters of Burgess Park, all hygiene and fresh air. The best recollection of its ambience remains in the photographs of Roger Mayne, taken in and around Southam Street in the heart of this district. There isn’t much of it left now, hardly anything. The sky looks more or less the same. So all I can paint is an idea, an atmosphere, a might have been, a could have been but never was. Perhaps next time I’ll have something to show you, and more news on “Tourist”, which also includes an account of the district I’m referring to.

One paradox. In the TV series “’Allo ‘Allo’, the character Edith, wife of café owner René, bears a strong facial resemblance to Jo Hopper, the artist’s wife who modelled in many of his paintings. The radio code name Edith and René use for communicating with England is “Nighthawk”. “Nighthawks” is of course one of Hopper’s most famous works. Strange.