Views of North America
No 9 Acadia National Park,
Maine
Contributed by Anne &
Timmy
Bass Harbour Head Lighthouse
Anne and Timmy have contributed two beautiful and striking
photographs of the Acadia National Park, one of the oldest National Parks
in the United States. The clear blue air is a characteristic of Maine,
the most northerly of the New England states. For me, just looking at the
first picture could not help but bring to mind my favourite American artist,
and one of the most brilliant painters of the twentieth century, Edward
Hopper (1882 - 1967).
Edward Hopper loved the landscapes of Maine, which he
painted many times: the cold, washed-out sunlight which is such a characteristic
feature of the state for much of the year was perfectly suited to his lonely,
vacant paintings, with their extraordinary atmosphere of strangeness and
alienation. A superb Edward Hopper site is:
Edward Hopper
Look at his marvellous painting 'Gas', a picture of a petrol
outlet on a lonely country road, at just that moment when dusk is falling,
and the shadows darken under the trees, and the weary motorist starts to
think about a warm dinner and a welcome bed in a close-by pub or motel.
As in so many of Edward Hopper's works, you can 'see' the silence. I have
not reproduced 'Gas' here, but here are three other Hopper masterpieces:
Light at Two Lights 1927
No, it is not the Bass Harbour Head lighthouse, which Anne
and Pet have so beautifully photographed, but another of Maine's lighthouses.
It is strikingly similar.
Early Sunday Morning 1930
Now this is vintage Hopper, the feeling of silent emptiness,
the long shadows, and those dusty folds of curtain: without those brown, threadbare hangings the picture
would somehow lose a lot of its magnetism - your eye is irrevocably drawn
towards them. Don't you feel like taking them down, and giving them a good
shake?
New York Movie 1939
Painted when the American film industry was at its zenith,
and the pictures were shown in glorious, Eastern Baroque palaces, ironically made
of plaster and wire mesh. The heavy, ornate furnishings and decoration
of the old-fashioned picture palace, with its red velvet, and gold-tasselled
cords and trimmings, are caught beautifully by Hopper.
For me, the best part of the painting is the black-and-white
luminosity of the screen itself - you can tell it is a film made in the
old days of gleaming nitrate stock, which was replaced by the much grainier
and less polished black and white stock of the 1950s - more durable and
safer of course, but black and white film lost a great deal in the change.
The usherette's mind is far, far away; she has probably
seen the film a score of times already.
For readers who are interested in learning more about
the magnificence of Acadia National Park, here are a couple of sites:
Acadia National Park
National Parks Service
- Acadia
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