In the last few days I have been looking for that “Edward Hopper place”, a silent, uneventful, yet compelling place, open and spacious enough to create room for the imagination of the viewer to stream and meander. Hopper left a lot of the space empty in his paintings, the settings devoid of details, the faces often blurred and the stories incomplete, believing that the less you reveal the more you attract.
Empty space and empty time was what I tried to create, one with me in it, that is. An empty table in an empty room with just a chair and a coat hanging on it. I focussed on putting utmost attention on the small details within the body, the little shifts in the alignment of the spine, the tiny almost unvoluntary movements of the fingers, the sit bones sharing the weight, the shifting of balance in the walk. In the small details time expands and seem to create that space I am looking for. Occasionally the mind is caught wandering, captured by things like a little speck on the surface of the table or the lines in the palm of my hand; I let that happen until I am ready to bring back the focus to the body. Movement comes out of genuine necessity. Slices of stories present themselves to the observing mind.
Time seems to be the crucial element, the way it’s marked, the way it flows and the narrative is created. A time and a space that suggest something is about to happen…
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