Welcome to Art & Copy!
A one-stop shop to find out what Rachel and Anna have been up to lately. This issue, murder mysteries keep cropping up...
What have we been making?
Anna
I recently published a new episode of my webcomic Pumpkin and the Patch, which you can read here at ptapcomic.com
Here’s a little snippet -
I also work for the video game company One More Multiverse creating a library of vector icons for their UI (User Interface). One More Multiverse is an online platform for creating settings in which to play TTRPGs (Tabletop Role-Playing Games, like Dungeons and Dragons). It’s still in closed beta, but if you want to learn more, check out their website and join the discord.
I get to make a ton of specific icons for various spells, concepts, and items, and it’s super fun! Here’s a few animals I did recently:
I’m also a part-time coloring assistant on an upcoming graphic novel right now! It’s super secret still, so I can’t share any pages, but I can tell you it’s a murder mystery with twists, turns, and amazing art!
Rachel
My new flash fiction story, “Cock Block,” is coming out in Moon City Review later in March. Be sure to check my website for updates on this!
I have taken a break recently from creative writing, and have switched to a more academic mode, in which I read Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay. I have been working on a short essay in response to Carson’s text, which I will feature in our next issue!
To further explore the relationship between art and copy, I would like to devote this issue to the art of Edward Hopper and share some of my own work - namely, an essay called A Seat at the Table, as well as a short creative piece called Ed and Jo, about Hopper and his wife, Josephine.
Edward Hopper’s artwork has inspired critics and artists alike. His painting Chop Suey inspired the cover art done by Anna herself (!!) for my own chapbook, The Lost Myth of True Love, which reimagines the ancient tale of Orpheus and Eurydice.
Critic Clement Greenberg claimed that Hopper "is not a painter in the full sense; his means are second-hand, shabby, and impersonal." Still, he concedes that "Hopper simply happens to be a bad painter. But if he were a better painter, he would, most likely, not be so superior an artist.” One of my favorite short story collections of all time is In Sunlight or In Shadow: Stories Inspired by the Paintings of Edward Hopper. The collection features writers Stephen King, Joyce Carol Oates, Joe R. Landsdale, and more. Each story is based on a painting by Hopper, and each expands the world and narrative, giving even more life, voice, and vividness to Hopper’s already electric artwork.
A Seat at the Table: Hopper Sheds New Light on Women
An Essay by Rachel Lloyd
Hung throughout my life have been the paintings of Edward Hopper, and draped around them has been a quiet sense of desperate and unnerving ennui. Looking at his paintings, I am constantly peering in, intruding in a place where I feel as if I have none. I look and look away, almost embarrassed to have seen; always feeling I have been staring rudely at a private moment. For this reason, his paintings have always interested me. The duality of emotion that Hopper’s paintings evoke is equally interesting and uncomfortable. I always shift awkwardly when I look at his paintings. The seemingly non-existent windows (almost like wounds in the buildings) of his paintings invite you in, while the obvious privacy and soft sadness of the scenes seem to force you away. This constant reality is what makes Hopper’s otherwise still and contemplative works some of the most dynamic and vividly alive paintings I have ever seen.
Yet the painting I return to again and again is perhaps the least Hopper-esque among them: Chop Suey (1929). My family has a copy of it hung in our front room, the most well-windowed room in the house. I return to it because it does not feel difficult to look at. It is the only Hopper I feel comfortable in. I do not get the sense that I am a perverted voyeur, gawking through the windows of strangers, penetrating their lives and disturbing their quiet existence. Nor do I feel like I am an outsider, separated by strong lines or clear windows that divide an inside from an outside. Quite to the contrary, Chop Suey is perhaps Hopper’s most wholly inviting painting, as the viewer does not feel a sense of exclusion, but of inclusion. In Chop Suey, we are not made to peer through a window or be cut off, but we are part of the experience. We are perhaps walking up to the table or sitting at a nearby one, but no matter the case we are members of the moment, instead of observers.
While there are other Hopper paintings that have this same effect, such as New York Movie (1939) or Morning Sun (1952), what continues to make Chop Suey a warm and relaxed painting is the friendly contentment of its characters. The two predominant characters are the women sitting together. In a very Hopper-like fashion, even though they are clearly out to lunch, it is either before the food has arrived or after it has been taken away. In this way, the two women are given license to focus on each other, without distraction. Despite the obvious reality of the situation, Hopper’s paintings are never about the action of a moment, but are about the themes and the people. Put simply, as John Updike said, “Hopper is always on the verge of telling a story” (Phelan). It is clear to me that the two women are out to lunch together, perhaps they are members of the era of working women and are out on their break, or just friends on a trip to the city. In either case, they are friendly, the one on the right leaning in towards the other. It also seems apparent that they are having a conversation. Some critics and reviewers deny this point. They say there seems to be an emptiness on the one woman’s face and emotional distance between them. But few dispute that they are at lunch together, and I argue that it is almost instinctive for people who are out to lunch together to talk to one another, especially with no food on the table. Even if the one woman is not laughing in that moment, the other is leaning in as if to say something. This friendliness adds to the inclusive feeling of Chop Suey. In most of Hopper’s other works, if people are featured at all they are lonely and separate, as in Hotel by a Railroad (1952) or his most famous work Nighthawks (1942). However, Chop Suey has an air of companionship that continues to make it inviting to the audience.
An important thing to note is the context of the painting. Hopper painted Chop Suey in the late 1920s, a time that saw tremendous social advances for women. Two women out together without a male escort would have been irregular, if not absurd, in the era just preceding the twenties. However, in the twenties, women moved from private life into the public sphere and the working world. In this modern age, as we celebrate the election of our first female Vice President, it is important to consider how far we have come. Edward Hopper was painting in an era that was just introducing “Tables for Ladies” signs in their windows. Chop Suey is Hopper’s best example of this changing time. Even his painting Tables for Ladies (1930) has no literal tables with women dining together. But in Chop Suey, the ladies have a table all to themselves.
The more traditional couple in the background of Chop Suey serves as a foil, in stark contrast with the women in the foreground. I say more “traditional” because in two significant ways they are. They are both culturally more traditional (a man and a woman together, thus adhering to more Victorian-era propriety) and more traditional as a Hopper pair. They sit in bored and vacant company, lonely while not alone. They remind me a great deal of the couple in Room in New York (1932): the man sitting engaged elsewhere while the woman sits poised for something, but held in waiting.
In Chop Suey, the couple in the background differs from the two women in the foreground in both these respects, and more. The women sitting together are complete people: smartly dressed in cloche caps, while the woman sitting across from the man is barely a woman at all. She is a face, not even a full head, disembodied and floating, almost frozen in waiting. That is all there is of her. You cannot see her hands or even her feet beneath the table. She is part of a woman, forever incomplete, as if to say that the old “traditional” expectations of women led them to be unfulfilled. The lighting also contrasts the two pairs, and suggests a kind and sympathetic attitude toward women. Hopper uses light very effectively. It is yet another way that he defines an inside and an outside, having dark exteriors and well-lit interiors, as in the two aforementioned paintings, Nighthawks and Room in New York. In Chop Suey, all the women are lit well, while the man is encased in shadow, suggesting that he is the outsider in this scene. Even though the window next to the two women is covered partially by a screen or a print (something very unusual in Hopper paintings, in which windows usually vanish) the light is still clear and crisp. There is nothing to obstruct the women, while the man is difficult to see clearly in the darkness that surrounds him. All of this suggests a bright future for women.
The painting as a whole seems to be more hopeful and generally positive than a great deal of Hopper’s other works. Chop Suey, if not just pleasant, feels and looks quite literally uplifting. Hopper’s use of strong lines gives his paintings a sense of movement, as they often reach past the boundaries of the canvas and stretch out into the reality beyond the painting. With the use of lines, Hopper gives an urgency and vitality to buildings. He often uses horizontal lines to represent the American working class, like in Manhattan Bridge Loop (1928) and Early Sunday Morning (1930).
The movement of the lines off the canvas makes me think of trains, moving off in rhythmic repetition, a clear destination in mind. This is the effect of most of Hopper’s paintings. But when he paints vertical lines, as in Light at Two Lights (1927) or New York Pavements (1924), they are strong sturdy columns or lighthouses that reach towards the heavens.
While the horizontal lines represent the daily movement of life, the vertical lines are his spires representing life’s mystery and great spirituality. Although Chop Suey is essentially a painting detailing life’s mundane movement, the predominant lines are vertical. The lines outlining the windows transcend the women and reach far past them. The vastness above them suggests a certain spirituality, and continues to presage great things ahead for women.
Ed and Jo
Fiction by Rachel Lloyd
“Sometimes talking to you is just like dropping a stone in a well, except that it doesn't thump when it hits bottom,”** Jo says to her husband. She means there are ripples but no sound.
He does not understand her, so he continues to paint on a partially covered canvas. Slowly the image of her words overtakes him, but still he cannot see the word stone, jagged and square, falling into a dark well, colliding silently with the black water below. The word stone has no color, neither does the well. “Well I think if I could say it in words there would be no reason to paint,” he says.
“I myself am a painter,” she reminds him.
“True. A very human one.” He stops speaking, stops painting. “I guess I'm not very human,” he says, resuming his strokes. “All I really want to do is paint light on the side of a house.”
“Oh, Eddie,” she says, with a shake of her head that combs light through her hair and onto the studio floor.
I love you, he wants to say, but they both know being a muse is never so simple. So, he paints her into empty rooms and standing naked before sunlit windows and standing next to men she has never met. He paints her into the bodies of many women, into spaces whose walls she has never touched with the pads of her fingers. But she can touch with her hands the strokes of his brush and trace the fine borders where sunlight yields to shadow. She can hold the frames of these paintings and be eternally refracted between the self she is and the self she sees. Come night, they each dream about their paintings.
They may be buried together, but their paintings do not appear in the same exhibits.
** This quote is adapted from a real quote by Josephine Nivison Hopper as it appears on page 16 of Sherry Maker’s book Edward Hopper, published by Brompton Books, 1990.
What have we been enjoying?
Anna
I’ve taken a short break from borderline obsessive crocheting to play some games and watch movies, but just before starting this media binge I finished crocheting The Patch (of Pumpkin and the Patch fame):
The video game I’m into right now is Ooblets - an adorable cross between Pokémon and a farming simulator.
I’ve also watched my way through most of the Disney princess movies for some more escapism, and really enjoyed Encanto!
And last but not least, last month I played through the Nancy Drew edition of the board game series To Hunt A Killer - Mystery at Magnolia Gardens. It’s an immersive mystery game where you sift through realistic physical evidence in the box to solve a crime. I can’t recommend it enough for anyone who likes mysteries - the only downside is there’s only one ending, so once you solve it you can’t really replay it. It’s a perfect present to re-gift after one use.
Rachel
Apart from reading dense literary theory, I have been taking breaks to read Agatha Christie's novels. I hope to (eventually) work my way through the whole Hercule Poirot saga: a hefty 34 books! I just finished The Mystery of the Blue Train (sixth in the series), the first one in which I managed to guess the killer before Poirot’s big reveal.
I also recently finished Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. I hesitate to say I enjoyed it, exactly, but I would recommend it to everyone! I read it in one sitting, and without a doubt, I am glad to have read it. In short, it is about saving the world.
Apart from reading, a video game I have been long anticipating called Horizon: Forbidden West was released a couple of weeks ago. The day before the release, I stayed up until midnight to play it the moment it came out, and have been spending nearly every spare second with the main character, Aloy. The visuals are nothing short of stunning and the world and characters are so alive. It is a masterclass in collaborative world-building and story-telling. Sometimes I pause and sit back just to appreciate how beautiful it is. Here are some photos from my own game-play (which is not even in the highest resolution mode!!):
I’m also joining two new book clubs that I am very excited about. Of course, I am looking forward to reading the books, but I also look forward to sharing some of my thoughts with all of you as well, so stay tuned!