Our good friend Mary gave us a gigantic book of Edward Hopper paintings last year, a high school graduation present from her mother. The book was published in the 1960s; in addition to many beautiful reproductions in color, quite a few are in black and white. I took the absence of color as an opportunity to copy the paintings using something like monochrome. Actually the color here is a mix of phthalo blue and burnt umber, which yields a lovely, greenish hue that feels like a leftover from the nineteenth century. The intent is to remain faithful to the lights and darks and, of course, the accurate placement of things.

The original Hopper paintings were done about a century ago, many of them in places near where I grew up in the eastern U.S. Copying them was for me a strange, dreamlike experience of time travel. When you spend a few hours looking and copying a drawing or painting you begin to inhabit the time and place where the painting was done, not to mention the mind of the artist. 

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