“Hopper at Hockman's “

“Hopper at Hockman’s” was a work in progress for some time.  The Hockman’s Candy building is a real building in downtown DuBois , PA.

My third floor studio is directly across the street and I see this building every time I look out the window.  I have admired the intricacy of the brick cornices and the fine old architecture of this landmark.  One day as I was leaving my studio at ground level, the sun was just right on the Hockman building.. and it looked very much like an Edward Hopper painting.  This was the inspiration which compelled me to do this piece.

About ten years ago on a visit to New York City , my husband and I saw an Edward Hopper retrospective at the old Whitney Museum.

Hopper’s painting, “Sunday Morning” had been removed from its frame and placed on Hopper’s easel.  This totally amazing painting seemed to  be even  more intimate and accessible, and it almost felt as Hopper, himself, had just left the room.  Every painting and every sketch in that exhibit was a joy to behold and all inspiring.  

Seeing the Hockman building look  like a Hopper subject in my hometown waiting for me to paint was motivating. I took multiple photos of the building, but it was necessary to do a scaled drawing  on large sheets of graph paper of the entire building.  In order to draw or paint a subject, one must understand it, my scaled drawing forced me to do this. .  I knew it had to be large, bigger than most paintings I do, and it is 27.5 inches  by 48 inches.  My husband dry mounted a large piece of UArt paper on an oversized piece of foam core.  I began the time consuming process of redrawing the subject on the pastel paper. I also used fine line markers  so that my lines would not wash off when I washed in the colors with a watercolor underpainting.  I  added the watercolor wash, blocked in the color with hard and soft pastel sticks, and used T Squares, rulers and more to create horizontals and verticals.  I worked on this painting for months and continued to get more ideas.

I had recently finished  Gail Levin’s biography on Edward Hopper and his wife Jo Hopper,  a truly wonderful book, and I wanted to include the Hoppers in this painting. I imagined them on a road trip in their Buick stopping at Hockman’s and interacting with Tom and Joan, and I put them all in the painting.  This required more research, and scaling the people and the Buick to the rest of the painting.  The empty upstairs windows, were peopled with characters from Hopper’s paintings.  

The finished painting was part of a display, Art in the Windows, in the window of our downtown store, during the Celebration of the Sesquicentennial of DuBois in June 2022.

This project was great fun and it ‘s my tribute to Edward Hopper.