These Two Pages of My Sketchbook Are Haunted

by the artist known as '14'

Much amusement can be derived from flipping through the pages of high society magazines and checking out the photos of wealthy people posing at various balls and charity fundraising events. Many appear stiff and taut with freakish cosmetic surgery, overly flashy with blinding white teeth, shiny couture and sparkling jewels - I just love it.  Palm Springs Life is probably the best publication on the newsstand to view these glamourous spectacles and while flipping through it a few months ago, I came upon a photo of Tom Bosley and his lovely wife holding a white fluffy little dog. They seemed so happy and yet both their hands were twisted and knotty with arthritis. There was something so beautiful and scary about the image, that I started a rough sketch right there in the bookstore and later came home to finish it up. While working on it, I heard that Tom Bosley had passed (RIP) and I suddenly got the creeps. Later, a friend sent me a society photo from a hoity-toity event in Houston. There was something creepy about the people posing in it, as though they had recently emerged from an long sleep in the cold dark basement of their drafty cavernous castle and flew to the party inside a swarm of shrieking vampire bats as thunderstorms raged through the night.  I'm sure they're nice people, but it's fun to let the imagination run wild. That being said, I formally declare these two pages of my sketchbook to be haunted.  Medium: graphite, ink, marker and ectoplasm.

Edward Hopper, Nighthawks, 1942, Oil on canvas, 30x60 inches. Art Institute of Chicago

Robert J. Hughes, writer living in New York and Paris


Even the everyday, of course, can be monumental. At the Art Institute of Chicago hangs the almost-mythic Nighthawks. This is Edward Hopper's iconic and immense painting of three patrons and a counterman seen in artificial yellow light in a diner in the shadowed emptiness of a summery New York night. I did not know from reproductions how large this painting was, but on seeing it for the first time in person, I was struck by its immensity and how fresh and awe-inspiring the original would be.

t’s a rare painting that conjures stillness – Monet's water lily paintings, perhaps, manage it as well – though for Hopper, the color of stillness was somehow an essential part of his palette.

Where the sculptors of the Laocoön captured the doom of man somehow offending the gods – don't mess with destiny – and rendered the mythic palpably human (if heroic in scale), Hopper portrayed the silent figures of daily life, yet somehow imbued them with the dignity, the grace, even, of something mythic in our nature. They may not have to worry about the wrath of gods, and perhaps must contend instead with the wayward distances of others, but they sit and chat as if they were somehow noble still, seated far from Olympus and yet, because of Hopper, nevertheless near to eternity.