A clear view
When our congregation designed our new sanctuary, we wanted windows that help us see our neighborhood’s needs.
Edward Hopper’s cottage in Truro, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod. (Photo by joseph a / Creative Commons)
A large Edward Hopper painting hangs above my writing desk at home. It’s not an original oil, mind you, but a beautifully framed reproduction nonetheless. Hopper’s use of shadow and light to create specific moods in austere cityscapes has long caught my eye. His careful placement of human subjects inside windows, often just a solitary figure, evokes themes of loneliness, melancholy, and boredom.
Curiously, the windows in Hopper’s paintings tend to be much larger than the people peering through them. Perhaps not coincidentally, his home studio on Cape Cod had a massive, ten-foot-tall window next to his easel from which he looked out on the world. When someone asked his wife, Josephine, what was the most difficult aspect of being married to a great artist, she replied, “It took me a long time to realize that when he is looking out the window, he is working.”
What is it about the view through a window that can enlarge a viewer’s life, or in the case of Hopper, foster “his personal romance with the act of looking,” as a student of his put it? It could be that gazing out a window pulls a person beyond their circumscribed life, past their tired routines, and away from the predictability of yet another day.
