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I really just wanted to share one of my favorite Edward Hopper paintings but the message attached really speaks to my own thoughts on painting. The painting is his Early Sunday Morning from 1930.
I like that it seems so still, so static, yet it is filled–at least for me– with tensions and deep emotional content. That reaction is my own imagination reacting to the elements of the painting. Hopper created an armature, a framework, that gives shape to the emotional response of the viewer without filling out all of the details.
You look at it and there are guides in place that gently direct you to Hopper’s own emotional location. But it never spells it out in great detail, never tells you what you should feel. It relies on your imagination to fill in the voids, to fill it with details to which you can personally relate. You are no longer a mere viewer, you are an emotional participant.
That’s how I think a painting should work, as a sort of active terminus where the work of the artist and the imagination of the viewer meet.
Sometimes, it works that way. Sometimes, it doesn’t. I think this Hopper definitely works in this way.
Redtree Times 
I’ve never seen this painting, and it’s fascinating. The first thing I noticed was the difference between the upper story, with the perpendicular windows, and the ground floor, where the leaning barber pole and storefront awnings seem to cant everything to the left, just a bit. It creates a feeling of something being ‘off-kilter’ — and that certainly can engage the imagination.
Good point.
Art for me is exactly like poetry. Sometimes it’s either love or hate on the spot. Sometimes I get my spirit filled. Sometimes I just don’t know what they are talking about and sometimes I am not moved enough to care to dig deeper. Sometimes it just is, I get nothing, give nothing. This painting, I just want to look away, before something moves in one of those windows.