Feeling Blue

An artist of the floating world. He thinks to himself: What is real anymore and what but an illusion? Am I any less real than those around me, was I the only one who wasn't serious?

Do the lanterns hanging above the heads of the characters represent the state of their souls, each encapsulating something of what is quintessential, each a veritable world in itself ? At one level the painting seems to me to be about the gaze and how we avoid looking at what cannot be looked at. The void. The clown's abstract look into the distance, the man in the beret-the Frenchman-with his sharp, this-worldly look, the man on the extreme left of the picture, isolated, radically cut off from the world and society (indicated by the vertical beam that acts as a symbol of separateness)...each has a way of looking at, engaging with, reality.

The man on the left-the pimp- holds himself, as if for reassurance. He is wrapped up in himself and quite oblivious of the others. It would be true to say of him what Augustine would say of man in general: he doesn't even know that he lacks , or what he lacks. There is only a quiet, almost resigned, desperation about his whole demeanour. The lantern above him bears an uncanny resemblance to the moon. Is this a co-incidence or are we to infer some sort of mystical union between the universe and the self? In this case, someone, something, that is sad, reflective, heavy with thought. Maybe, then, the painting is about our connections and relations with the stars and ourselves and maybe that order has come unhinged...we are left to freely float in an alien universe.

I think, however, that the painting is really about the connections and relations -or rather the lack of them-that we have with other people. It is about people who are isolated from one another and the world. And what of the central figures, the only ones that seem to form some sort of worldly relation to one another? Who is the woman defiantly looking at us? A prostitute, an outsider who is someone beyond the pale of normal human relationships that go up to make the solid world of bourgeois respectability. The man with his back to us , a client , is a person from such a world and he freely intermingles with the undesirables, the marginals. What does this tell us? That the only exchanges between human beings are artificial, tainted with self-interest, a search for nothing but the meeting of bodies?

But perhaps the woman doesn't really belong to this group either. As a misfit, she is closer in spirit to that other painted figure, the clown. Both are theatrical performers, both see the illusionary nature of reality and help others find joy in contingency. But I think the figures-perhaps stereotypes is a better word- are also linked in a different way: the cigarettes. Perhaps it is the three figures who we see smoking who are linked by some inner bond, some common outlook. But if they are, it is not something we can divine and it remains hidden, only a symbol like some undeciphered hieroglyph whose meaning escapes us.

In one sense, though, the story revolves around the clown and he is the central axis around which the others might be understood. Since here we are presented with a uniqueness and singularity that we can read (the man on the extreme left is also isolated, but he remains a closed figure and we can never be sure of exactly what he is thinking. It is this mysteriousness, these thoughts of his that are incommunicable, that places him beyond the frame). Where one might expect an angel or a hero one finds a clown! At the still heart of the universe is there only a cosmic joke? Is this what the clown sees and is this what he is trying to look beyond, to out stare the nothingness? The lantern above him is hell-like.

Behind the characters lies nothing but different shades of blue; they are engulfed by it. Is this, then, the wreckage of human history. Perhaps there is nothing left to say. In the last days there can be no further developments, as each person becomes what he or she was in truth, each is reduced to their own essence and nothing else, and this thought fills them with horror.

The figures to the right are obviously from the upper-middle classes. Again, one can see this in the lanterns which give one the feeling of opulence and restrained splendour. Here, again, we are made acutely aware of how people inhabit utterly separate and distinct worlds. And one begins to notice the infinite distances between the lanterns, the abyss of desert spaces. Robert Hughes was right to say that Hopper had recognized that in America the great frontier had moved inwards. I see the woman as talking to herself, trying to explain something but the husband's gaze has left her and his thought is elsewhere. Even in what one might expect to be the most intimate relation there is a terrible chasm. It is as if Hopper is saying even in what is most familiar, the sure world of marriage, there is little else but the avoiding of eye contact, there is, in these 'evenings of the mind', a deep chill in the heart and one cannot help feeling blue.

Through blue summer evenings, I’ll go down the pathways,

I’ll let evening breezes bathe my bare forehead.

I’ll speak not a thing: I’ll think not a thing:

And, I’ll go, far, far away, like a gypsy...

(this was copied from a book)