The Chair

Chapter 26: The First Lorileigh-2

Edward Hopper (July 22,1882 – May 15, 1967) was born in Nyack, a yacht building center on the Hudson River north of New York City. He was one of two children of a comfortably fairly kind of well-to-do family. His parents, of mostly Dutch ancestry, were Elizabeth “Beth” (née Griffiths) Smith and Garret Henry Hopper, a dry-goods merchant. Although not as successful as his forebears, Garret provided well for his two children with considerable help from his wife’s inheritance. He retired at age forty nine. Edward and his only sister Marion attended both private and public schools. They were raised in a strict Baptist home. His father had a mild nature, though was stricken occasionally by fits of lunacy, hysteria, and melancholy unexpectedly, unfashionably, and unknowingly at random incidental, indiscriminate, and irregular, times, such as, but not limited to, giving a dog, any dog, that begs for something sweet to eat something to eat though it was not always sweet, without getting his hand bit, and taking a pebble and casting it to the sea then watching the ripples that unfold into me, and rubbing any ancient urn he could get his hands on to feel its historic enameled smooth, polished finish, with now lost folk of all kinds painted on them while wondering what it must have been like to go to war to fight over such treasures, but always after hearing the first red robin of Spring chirping gloriously, the first yellow leaf of Autumn dropping from the elm tree planted in the front yard, the first snow of Winter falling while carrying sadness on his shoulders like a wornout overcoat in pockets creased and tattered hanging the rags of his hopes, and as the ice cream man in his horse drawn wagon came by for the last time suddenly last Summer, a man for all seasons with no reasons, and the household was dominated by women, including Hopper’s mother Beth, of whom little is known, except for the fact she encouraged Edward to finger paint, cut up shapes from construction paper creating strange things, make macoroni mosaics, and mold a clay she had formulated, Beth’s Clay™, an early forerunner of what later became Play-Doh™, a modeling compound for young children, and to be honest, adults of all ages, I know, because I have some, always have and I likely always will, to make arts and crafts projects at home and at school, for which she was granted a patent, (US 1,996,283 C4) later selling half of the rights, assigns, and privileges thereof to Cutol Products Company, Inc. ®, a privately held manufacturer of “new, one-off, speculative, developmental, take a flying leap, and invest” products founded in 1890 and headquartered in Newark, New Jersey, with a storage warehouse and distribution center next to a spur track of the Delaware, Pennsylvania, & New Jersey Railroad in Hoboken, the company later down through the years evolving through numerous financial transactions and mergers and acquisitions, Hasbro ®, grandmother Essis Mae who favored jogging nude in the park before dinner, wearing sensible shoes, though was mostly seen barefoot in and around the house, and made Irish potato soup and stews of all recipes, and sister Wynona, who was found dead in an abandoned ice box left in the street four blocks away from her house a week after her fourth (4th) birthday having sneaked out of her second floor bedroom window down down down the dark ladder for a walk before dawn in October all by herself, and maid Hazel, who was “a better cook, foul mouthed contrarian, and polite conversationalist, but only when guests visited, than she was at scrubbing and cleaning”, although she was considered by the Hoppers “as quite the laundress” and “always keeping a ship shape pantry well stocked and in good order, with jarred fruits on the top shelves, and canned vegetables on the bottom, plates piled neatly, the hanging pots and pans aligned with military precision, everything spick and span”, Edward’s birthplace and boyhood home later listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2000, on the first Tuesday of January because New Year’s holiday fell on a Saturday that year, and nearly everything was closed on Monday continuing the celebration of the advent of another year, this time the millenium, though many time and calendar people know better—a century must start with the number 01, and not 00, because 00 represents 100, or 100 years of a century and 01 represents 1, or the 1st year of a new century, go see for yourself, before an assembled, adoring, and affectionate throng of enthusiastic enthralled ecstatic Hopper lovers, lackeys, and loyalists, as a twelve inch thick blue ribbon tied to the two pillars guarding the house at the top of the steps, five in all, was cut by a pair of four foot long scissors the building christened with Dom Perignon™ (1990) champagne by a dark skinned man with a black moustache preening, pruning, and prancing around in top hat and tails, Mayor Michael Mohammed Ahmad, who stood before a microphone that screeched as he grabbed it, waved at the sound man to the right of him on the porch, started to speak, coughed, coughed again, then began the dedication by swaying, swooning, and singing

You never close your eyes anymore when I kiss your lipsAnd there’s no tenderness like before in your fingertipsYou’re trying hard not to show itBut baby, baby I know it

You lost that lovin’ feelin’Whoa, that lovin’ feelin’You lost that lovin’ feelin’Now it’s gone, gone, gone, whoa oh….

the crowd laughing, whistling, hooting, and booing him, promptly breaking that song off and saying “You know what really gets me though? I mean, here I am, I gotta live in this stinkin’ town and I gotta read in the newspapers about some hot shot kid, new star of the college team. Every year it’s gonna be a new one. And every year it’s never gonna be me. I’m just gonna be Mike. Thirty year old Mike. Forty year old Mike. Old mean old man Mike.” To make a long story short, after quoting Thomas Jefferson, the Qur’an, Euripedes, and Sally Muriel Gloss, and mentioning “how fortunate we are to live in such a country as this, in a time of not our choosing,” he ended his opening speech with “Thank y’all for coming, be sure to recycle, and don’t drink and ride.” The home is now operated as the Edward Hopper House Art & Culture Convention, Calliope & Convocation Center. It serves as a nonprofit community center featuring exhibitions of daring, strength, resilience, and intelligence, replete with workshops, such as turner and joiner woodworking classes, lectures by various retired professors seeking one last grab at glory with their tales of a trip to Egypt when their camel died near the pyramids, a moribund tale of 13th Century Turkish literature and its impact on Christian and Moslem relations over the centuries, and claims to having found Beethoven’s missing unpublished 10th Symphony in B flat major, based on a major scale B-Dur ist eine auf B♭ basierende Dur-Tonleiter mit den Tonhöhen B♭, C, D, Es, F, G und A. Ihre Tonart hat zwei B-Ton. Sein relatives Moll ist g-Moll und sein paralleles Moll ist b-moll, in Leipzig, Germany that was found sitting on a timeless pine chair from North Carolina in a dark drab dreary closet, constant senior citizen events, for ages 50+, including bingo, shuffleboard, and various card games, including Crazy Eights, Uno, and Mille Bornes, operatic and stage play performances, mostly Roman, but some Greek, tragedies, and special events such as spelling bees, taffy pulls, phone booth crammings, hide and seek, Red Rover, cow tippings, javelin catchings, double dutch jump ropings, and fortune tellings with all gypsies, tramps, and thieves sailed in from Transylvania, in central Romania, with its natural border the Carpathian Mountains in the east and south, and the Apuseni Mountains, in the west, an area known most famously as the home of Dracula each April 25th as part of just one of many area Spring commemorations, the annual Aspic, Broth, & Tea Leaf Fun Festival & Freak Out.

Edward Hopper became interested in art at a young age. He went through nearly all of the standard elementary, or grammar, school phases of artistic development, including fingerpainting, round edged scissor cuttings of snowflakes, crayon sketches of American presidents, pencil etchings of farm animals, burnt charcoal from charred wood scrbblings, molded clay dinosaurs, paintbrush daliances, doily Valentines, and early perspective line apathication arc applied to surveying, demonstrating a generally good propensity for each. His first fantastic foray in unbridled unwarranted unilateral art expression came in the 3rd grade when, after a dare by classmate Jeannie Michelle Kerckhoff, he painted a mural over the entire classroom ceiling, a re-creation of the 1815 The Battle of Waterloo oil on canvas by William Sadler II, depicting the Battle of Waterloo under the command of Napoleon Bonaparte against British forces under the Duke of Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, the Prussian troops under Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher, Fürst von Wahlstatt, and soldiers from the Netherlands, the Province of Hanover, the Duchy of Nassau, and the Principality of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, as an unruly unwashed unsupervised group of seven and eight year-olds egged him on, many keeping still the scaffold made from book shelves on which Edward was laying on his back most of the time very still, while feeling the true angst, agitation, and anxiety of an artist for the first time, each of the students simultaneously doing their own mischievous monstrous maneuverings mostly of a devilish destructive dysfuctional nature, as the first year teacher, Miss McBride, a 22 year-old recent of Boston University from first Dover, and then Dedham, Massachusetts, majoring in Afrikaner Arithmetic and Aromatics, and soriority sister at Delta Delta Delta, a Tri Delt, having taken ill at lunchtime after eating a badly burned beef bean burrito went home without notifying either the school prinicipal, Mr. Marsden, the school nurse, Mrs. Holswirth, fellow teachers, the janitor, Mr. Wiśniewska, or any of her students.

At age 16 in 1896, Edward personally organized and oversaw a painting and sculpture art and floral design seminar, the first of its kind in the region, at the Rockland County Garden Club, a series of classes to help prepare its members and the community for participation in the county’s annual Hudson Valley Flower Show, an event later owned in 1927 by Florists’ Transworld Delivery ® (FTC), held twice each year, scheduled each Spring in May the week before Memorial Day and Autumn in November a week before Thanksgiving, and still held today, the series consisting of three (3) classes, participants attending any one of or all three, or only two, classes if they wanted to, the space being limited, the schedule set for each class from 9:30 AM to 2:00 PM January 29th, “Creative Line and Mask Design”, February 26th “Parallel, Perspective & Parallax Design”, and October 1st “The Colors Orange, Purple, Brown, Red, & Yellow”, the fee for each hands-on class 25¢, or 75¢ for all three , which covered all supplies needed “to make and take home a finished design”, no checks or I.O.U.s accepted, with coffee, tea, sweetened or unsweetened, and donuts, blintzes, kolaches, and danishes served, participants properly politely asked to bring a sack lunch, which nearly all of them did, with the understanding it was a BYOB affair, the registration being open with ** forms made available in the First Methodist Church vestibule which had to be completed and submitted by January 10th, or else there was 10¢ late fee charged for any and all of the classes attended, walk-ins welcome, but only if space was available, the entry fee for any and all late comers 50¢.

Edward Hopper became a good painter, his works including House by the Railroad (1925) Light at Two Lights (1927), Gas (1940), Nighthawks (1942), High Noon (1945) Office in a Small City (1953), and Sun in an Empty Room (1963), all of which are copyrighted ©, with nearly all of the originals currently on display in art galleries all over the world.