Brilliant Sun on Barren Hills / Echoes of an Edward Hopper Painting

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Edward Hopper, Mrs. Scott's House, oil on canvas, 34 1/4 x 50 1/8 inches, 1932, Maier 
Museum of Art at Randolph College, Lynchburg, VA


I don't usually start a painting with another artist's painting in mind.
My new canvas below however owes a big debt to Hopper's oil Mrs. Scott's House that's in the collection of the Maier Museum of Art at Randolph College in Lynchburg, VA.

Edward Hopper and his wife Josephine first stayed on Cape Cod in the summer of 1930. For the next several summers they explored the land out near the very end of Cape Cod's peninsula.  Famously private, I suspect he liked how few people there were in the remote town of Truro. One striking painting that resulted from this searching was Mrs. Scott's House seen above. 

Hopper was always drawn to paint big, solid volumes illuminated by brilliant sunlight. He must have loved the stark contrast of the massive and nearly bare dunes against the small but stubbornly upright house. As conflicting as these two different kinds of form are in Hopper's vision they strike an amiable truce. 

More than any other Hopper painting, Maier Museum of Art's oil celebrates a deforested Cape Cod that's now lost to us. In the 19th century farmers cleared the land for planting and harvested the forests for lumber. In many places what was left was an almost other worldly desert. I think Hopper loved the starkness of it. His Mrs. Scott's House makes full use of it. 

My wife and I started our long series of residencies in Hopper's studio in 1983. I realized Hopper had build the studio at the top of the dune to provide uninterrupted views from it in all directions. It was his observatory to study the light on land for the next 30 years.




Philip Koch, Edward Hopper's Studio, Truro, oil on canvas, 28 x 56 inches, 2020.
 

The Hopper's built a studio (using money Jo Hopper had inherited) in 1934 on a barren dune similar to the ones in Mrs. Scott's House.  Nowadays the trees have regrown so much you can't see the studio from the approach road. With Hopper's earlier piece in the back of my mind I got to envisioning how the lands surrounding the studio would have appeared in Hopper's day. 






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